


Like Lightning Under Your Skin

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Canon-Typical Violence, Confinement, Creature Castiel, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Hunter Dean, M/M, Magical Accidents, Major Character Injury, Masturbation, Soul Bond, Speciesism, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy, Winged Castiel, mentioned Charlie Bradbury/Gilda - Freeform, mentioned Ruby/Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 16:04:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12062385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Desperate for a way to save his brother from a demon’s clutches, hunter Dean does the unthinkable and seeks out a supernatural creature for help: a powerful lightning elemental, the kind he and his family should be killing. When his attempt to bind the elemental goes awry, he finds himself psychically connected to it instead. The creature’s emotions bleed into his; its pain echoes into him.Rather than finding the solution to saving Sam, Dean’s given himself a new and even more time-sensitive problem. He has to find a way to master the bond before the rest of the hunters decide he’s too far gone and put him down. The trouble is that the more time he spends connected to the elemental’s thoughts, the more he starts to wonder if they don’t have it all wrong. Maybe the creature, which calls itself Castiel, doesn’t deserve to be slaughtered; maybe the rest of its kind hadn’t deserved that, either.Or maybe that’s just Castiel’s voice in his head.





	Like Lightning Under Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Another Tropefest! Jojo and muse, you're the very best for giving us this fantastic challenge and running it like pros. I :churn: you guys.
> 
> Superhoney, thank you so, _so_ much for always being a willing target for my flailing and a discerning beta for my fic.
> 
> And Cat. Whichstiel. My darling. In case my wordless squealing wasn't emphatic enough: **I am so in love with your art. Thank you, thank you, thank you.**
> 
> Please, everyone, be sure to send your love to the art post! You can find it [here on Tumblr](https://whichstiel.tumblr.com/post/165245213775/i-made-this-art-for-the-2017-dean-cas-tropefest) and [here on AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12065427).

The knife flashed over Dean’s palm, opening three roughly parallel cuts deep in his flesh, and he clenched his jaw around a hiss of pain as blood pooled in his hand. It fell to the ground in fat droplets that broke against the pale sand at his feet. Despite the futility of it, he tried to cup his hand to keep more of it from spilling down; blood magic had power, and he didn’t want to leave bits of himself in the desert for anyone to use if he could avoid it.

What he was already risking was bad enough. His wards were down, had to be for the magic he was invoking, and the exposure made his skin prickle. Or maybe that was the lightning elemental, charging the air around them with static. Either way, he didn’t like it and he didn’t want it to continue for any longer than it had to.

He spun the blade around and offered it handle-first. The creature scowled and didn’t take it.

“This isn’t necessary.”

Its voice rumbled low, like distant thunder, which felt like a lie when Dean knew the danger was close at hand. There would be no sheltering from the resulting storm if the elemental lashed out. He had a few tricks up his sleeve, but at best they gave him a fifty-fifty shot of getting even with the elemental for taking him out. Mutually assured destruction wasn’t his preference as far as back-up plans, but it was all he had.

“You’re asking me to put myself under your power without offering anything in return.”

It wasn’t a new argument, but Dean thought they were past it, which was why he’d sliced himself open. Defenseless and bleeding was a shitty position to be in, especially with a lightning elemental (the last lightning elemental, if it could be believed) standing right there, ready to take advantage. If it was planning to do anything other than what he’d thought was an agreed-upon subjugation binding, Dean would be pretty epically fucked.

The thought made him snappish. “You’re not going to find another hunter willing to work with you instead of kill you. A mage would subjugate or even crystallize you, and not let you go after. Maybe a guardian would listen, but good luck finding one, especially one who isn’t already locked into an oath. They’re in pretty short supply since the wars.

“I’m pretty much your only chance, and I’m sure as shit not doing anything with you unbound. So either fuck off and try your luck elsewhere or take. The damned. Knife.”

Lighting flashed through the air around them as the elemental’s wings flared in agitation. Dean flinched but refused to back down, holding out the knife and staring down the elemental.

“Don’t pretend this is altruistic. You’re as desperate as I am. If you didn’t need me, you’d be trying to kill me just like the rest of them.”

“Wouldn’t just be trying,” Dean muttered. Then, louder, “I have other options. But it is what it is, and we’re both here. Can you just get over it already? Sooner rather than later would be nice, before I bleed out all over the desert.”

The elemental blinked down at the growing stain of Dean’s blood spreading in the sand, as though noticing it for the first time, and frowned. Its blue eyes sparked and lightning branched around them again; instead of splitting open the sky and dissipating, though, it crackled past Dean’s face and slammed into the ground just inches from his feet. He staggered backwards, cursing his way through the start of a banishment spell that he probably wouldn’t live long enough to complete. He’d let his wards down to start the subjugation—idiot that he was—and it must have been waiting for its chance.

The cuts on his palm stung like a motherfucker against the crudely etched runes on his gun’s grip, but he still yanked it free of its holster and kept it steady in his hand. Fortunately he’d planned for banishing an ornery elemental or two when he set out, so he’d chambered an amethyst round before turning into a total moron and dropping his guard. Though if anyone had tried to tell him the whole thing had been moronic to start with, he probably wouldn’t have argued with them.

The elemental interrupted his casting with another jolt, a small spark of electricity that locked up his gun and fizzled out before it reached his skin. He threw it aside anyway, partly from surprise and partly because he didn’t trust it not to explode on him. Lightning and gunpowder didn’t tend to get along overly well.

That left him with no amethyst to finish the banishment, so he let the chant drop in favor of a string of swearing. He had his knife, with a film of his own blood clinging to its edge, but that wouldn’t do a whole lot of good against the elemental’s power.

 _Brought a knife a storm fight,_ he thought. _Great fucking job, Winchester._

He braced himself. If he was gonna die from his own idiocy, he would at least go down swinging. He waited, eyes on the motionless elemental, but no further attack came.

Still frowning, it said, “Peace, hunter. I mean you no harm.”

Its stormy voice didn’t exactly coincide with a peaceful, non-threatening air; it certainly didn’t look any less menacing than it had when calling down the strike. But Dean did have to admit, if just to himself, that aside from his frayed nerves and the cuts he’d inflicted on his own hand, he hadn’t been injured. The elemental could have easily killed him when he dropped his wards, and it hadn’t done so.

Yet.

That didn’t mean he trusted it when it took a step toward him. Dean stepped backward again, calculating his chances if he dove for his gun. The elemental might fry him before he reached it. If it wanted, it would have plenty of time to kill or maim him before he could get far enough in a renewed banishment to use the amethyst round in the chamber, or to eject that one and replace it with a cold iron bullet. Even if Dean managed that, there was no telling if the gun would explode on him when he tried to fire it. His best option was still holding his knife at the ready and seeing what happened next, which said a lot about how terrible his position was.

When it reached the spot where Dean had been standing, the elemental knelt down, keeping its eyes locked on Dean the whole time. Dean had to force his own eyes down from that electric gaze when he noticed its hand moving, plunging into the sand at Dean’s feet. He saw for the first time that the iron red of his blood had vanished, and his stomach clenched with panic as the elemental drew out a piece of what looked like glass, clear with swirled crimson throughout. It was about the size of the elemental’s hand, with a thick base that branched up from his palm like tree branches. Like lightning.

He didn’t think he’d lost enough blood yet for the elemental to do anything with it. Elementals didn’t tend to have strong spell-casting abilities, so it couldn’t force a compulsion like a mage or use it in a locating spell like Dean and his fellow hunters might. But he didn’t know exactly what it had done, or what it was capable of.

“It’s unwise to leave so much of yourself behind for anyone to find,” said the elemental as it rose, offering Dean the twist of blood sealed within fused sand. Dean snatched it with his injured hand, because leaving it in the elemental’s power was also unwise.

He didn’t thank the creature or otherwise acknowledge what had just happened. He didn’t know what to make of it—stalling tactic?—and that made him uncomfortable and wary, so better to just ignore the past minute and shove the knife at the elemental again. It stared at him silently, and he shook the knife demandingly with his eyebrows raised.

Though it finally took the knife from Dean, it hesitated with the blade poised over the palm of its left hand. “I have only your word that you’ll break the subjugation once your aim is achieved.”

“Yeah, and that’s all you’re gonna get.” Dean transferred the blood-glass to his left hand, now that it was empty, and waited.

Bowing its head, the elemental acquiesced. It cut itself to match Dean, three gashes across its hand that glowed with crackling light instead of bleeding. Dean shuddered at the sight. Elementals, for the most part, looked human; the parts that didn’t looked extremely, disconcertingly inhuman.

Sea elementals grew scaled, finned tails instead of legs and bled bitterly salty water when gutted. Horned stone elementals’ skin was grey-brown and so hard it could take up to three grown men to shove a diamond-tipped pike through to the center. Instead of hair, fire elementals sprouted flames, and their wounds leaked blistering heat; but they simmered down quickly enough when dunked in a lake.

Lightning elementals, like the one before him, had huge fucking wings—even bigger than cloud elementals, though smaller than wind elementals—and electricity in their veins, and a single one could take out an entire human army if it decided to call down a storm.

Which was why it was vitally important for Dean to finish subjugating it. It wouldn’t give him complete control over the elemental, he wasn’t a mage who could ensnare its essence in a crystal and compel it to his will from there, but a subjugation was still better than no binding at all. It would prevent the elemental from doing him harm, at least actively. Elementals who really wanted to hurt someone who had them under a subjugation had been known to work around the restriction by causing larger-scale damage—fires, floods, building collapses—to catch their intended victim within.

The subjugation would also give him a flash of warning, an insight into the elemental’s thoughts, as it called on its element. It wouldn’t be enough to avoid disaster, but at least he’d see it coming.

The elemental held up its hand, lines of electricity sparking across its palm. With a grimace and an ancient phrase twisting his lips, Dean lifted his own hand and pressed their matching gashes together.

Lightning exploded around them, a roil of cutting light and roaring sound that seemed to come from every direction at once. Then the cacophony crashed inward, burying Dean’s mind beneath claps of thunder and shattering glass, lightning and sunbursts. Thoughts raced across his consciousness that tasted of rain and ozone, and though they spun and changed too quickly for him to pin down, he was pretty sure that they weren’t his own.

The storm of chaos and otherness ricocheted around Dean’s head and he fell to his knees, dropping the twist of glass and blood to the sand as he flung his arms over his head protectively. He couldn’t shut out the violent discord beating down on him, overwhelming his thoughts.

The gale grew fiercer still, both in Dean’s mind and outside, so strong he couldn’t separate the two anymore. It felt like the wind was spinning into a cyclone inside his head. Both of his hands pulsed with pain, as though the cuts on his right side had been mirrored to the left, then a solid wall of force knocked the breath out of him. He saw nothing when his eyes cracked open to scan for damage, more on instinct than conscious effort.

Just in front of thim, the elemental lay face-down in the sand. Its wings flapped and flailed, too rapidly uncoordinated for it to be generating the full storm, but somehow it still sent gusts of wind around Dean’s body to buffet his back every time they twitched.

Distress roared through him like another clap of thunder, sudden and horrifying, tangible enough to make him nauseous. It came out of nowhere; even given the tangled mess that was his consciousness, he was confused by its source. That half-formed insight spiralled into another flash of anguish, even more gut-wrenching, which in turn sparked further disorientation, and the conflicting, escalating emotions amplified with every lap around his thoughts.

 _Fucking monster did something._ Dean struggled to even gather that much of a thought together. Voicing it was out of the question, as was demanding an answer from it about what it had done. He felt so pulled apart that he couldn’t even be sure he was still connected to a working throat and mouth. He had no control over his body at all, nor over a mind spinning into infinity. At the same time, he was hyper-aware of every ache and sting, even phantom pains that drove agony into nothing he could call his own limbs.

Despite Dean’s inability to vocalize it, he was certain that the creature was responsible. It had tricked him, lured him to let down his guard, and now he was paying for his foolishness.

A wave of denial hit him so hard it felt like a physical blow. His breath, already shallow with pain and fear and the wind trying to rip it from his lungs, caught in his throat as the panicked rejection of that thought crashed over him. He fought to hold onto his conviction through a fog of cognitive dissonance so thick it momentarily dampened the rest of the noise buzzing inside his skull.

The elemental had done something. The elemental hadn’t done anything. Back and forth, almost equal in strength, but he shoved hard at his original thought _: Some kinda magic. Have to kill it._

The dissenting opinion fell away and everything quieted to a dull roar of dread. It was peace enough for Dean to gather himself, move his head enough to seek out the gun. He’d flung it just out of reach. Not far enough to protect him if it really did blow, but enough to be a problem now that he needed it.

But the thing still had his knife, and it wasn’t like he could strangle it with his bare hands. And those were his three options, because he was woefully unprepared. Because he was a _fucking idiot_ and not much of a spellcaster. All his gems and salts were encased in bullets with half the spells runed into them already, and those were useless without a gun.

He crawled toward it, pushing through the sand as best he could with feet and knees and elbows; both his hands burned with stinging pain when he tried to sink them in for leverage. Halfway there, a glance back showed the creature still insensate, writhing on the ground like an unhealed epileptic— _Or someone being electrocuted. Ironic._

It was the chance he needed. One good shot to get him out of the mess he’d made for himself. He’d find something else to help save Sam, and he’d be a hell of a lot more careful next time. Just one good hit.

Lighting broke the sky in half. It moved with purpose, like it had when the elemental sent it at Dean’s bloodstain and Dean’s gun, but that couldn’t have been the case with the new strike. Instead of lashing for Dean, it bridged the gap between heavens and earth directly through the elemental and struck one of the creature’s flung-out wings dead center.

It screamed, a shriek so piercing it felt like it was tearing Dean’s own throat out and sending a shock coursing through his body, too. He blacked out even before the resultant thunder cracked overhead.

\ \ \

Awareness rolled over Dean in a series of uncomfortable prickles: a crackle of static in his right arm, the pressure of something digging into his back, a tickle of dryness at the back of his throat. He rolled over. His shoulder sinking into the sand as it took most of his weight almost made him topple back again, but he righted himself and pushed up to his knees. Even if the effort was a little wobbly.

First look went to the lighting elemental. Unmoving, hopefully unconscious. Not dead—that would’ve left a hell of a scorch mark—but smoking impressively. He hadn’t known regular lightning could even char a lightning elemental, but its wings twisted into burnt ruins on either side of its prone form. The disfigurement was so severe that Dean actually winced in sympathy before reminding himself that it was the creature’s own fault. It had done it to itself when it was trying to do away with Dean.

He didn’t feel sorry for it, but even if he had, the solution would’ve been to put it out of its misery. He was about to do just that.

Dean’s knife dented the sand a few feet away from the elemental. It didn’t look like it had suffered any damage, and wasn’t likely to backfire the way his gun might’ve. If the elemental stayed down, he could get it in the heart easy as pie and be done. He could put this whole unbelievably stupid business behind him and get to tell everyone he’d ganked the last lightning elemental. No one had to know what a shitshow it had been.

Forcing himself to stand took too many tries, his feet sinking and sliding unevenly in the sand, and ended in regretful, nauseated dry heaves. But he managed to stay upright despite the bitter bile that tried to rise, unnaturally gritty and ashen, in his throat. Bone-deep pain ate into his arms, his ribs, his spine; he pushed through and staggered across the feet of unhelpful desert between where he’d fallen and where his knife had.

Crouching to retrieve the weapon sent him crashing down again, but he was close enough to the elemental that he just had to half shuffle, half crawl another arm’s length to get into position. Blade through the heart, and pray it didn’t give off enough of a shock to get him through the non-conductive antler grip.

Lightning elementals were, in theory, easy enough to take out. Shove a length of metal through the right spot in the chest and they short-circuited; just flat-out fried themselves. The trouble with actually doing it was twofold: getting close enough to do it was a bitch and a half, and they’d also fry anything or anyone stupid enough to be touching them without insulation.

_That would be a way more embarrassing way to go than just letting it kill me._

The elemental still hadn’t moved. That was the good news. The bad news was that its wings, even half burnt and mangled, stopped him from getting a good angle on its heart from behind. They melded into its back in an unnatural joining of flesh and feathers that was probably concealing bone and muscle structures that Dean couldn’t even begin to imagine. It had to take a shitload of power to keep a thing that size aloft; what Dean could see of its bare back under the wings had pretty serious musculature.

He could take a shot stabbing through all that and hope nothing deflected his blade before it hit home, or he could chance rolling it over to get a more direct path under what he was pretty sure were ribs and hope it didn’t wake up. There was a lot more hoping in both those scenarios than he was comfortable with, which left him cursing himself yet again for ever ending up with those as his only two options.

He briefly considered that there might be a third option of getting out while the getting was good, but no. He didn’t know what bullshit magic it had cast on him, but he wasn’t about to leave it alive to find out.

Rolling it over wasn’t easy. The elemental was a heavy fucker, and its wings caught and twisted and refused to cooperate with Dean as he tried to get them folded under the creature. It didn’t help that his arms and back ached every time he pushed, still recovering from whatever the hell had happened. But eventually he got it sprawled on its back, thanking as many stars as he could name—not many, he wasn’t a soothsayer—that his efforts hadn’t stirred the elemental from its unconsciousness.

He balanced his weight on both knees in the sand, pressed the knifepoint to the underside of its ribs, and felt a prickle. It wasn’t the tingles of electricity and complaining nerves he’d woken to. No, this was the sharp prick of a knife held to taut skin. He rubbed at the spot, letting his other hand, the one with the knife, lose its tension; as soon as its tip no longer dimpled the front of the creature’s robe, the sensation vanished from Dean’s chest.

_What the fuck._

He did it again, harder, and it came back like some kind of fucked up, severely misguided sympathetic reaction. He just had to ignore it; like the rest of his immediate problems, it should be solved when the elemental died. Pushing past the sensation, he shoved the blade up and in.

Pain exploded in his solar plexus and he fell back, knife abandoned to wrap his arms protectively against his stomach. Scrambling back, more of an undignified ass-scoot through the sand than a coordinated retreat, he double checked the elemental’s hands; they hadn’t moved. It didn’t seem to be rousing at all, not even with Dean’s knife protruding from its skin—though without Dean to support it, and since he’d barely sunk the tip in, it fell out of the wound.

Dean felt a twinge, then the blunt impact of something hitting his gut without much force even as he watched the knife drop against the elemental’s stomach. Yanking up his shirt showed no signs of injury, but he could feel it, a stinging pain right where he’d cut into the creature.

 _Son of a bitch,_ he thought. _It didn’t. It’s an elemental, it shouldn’t even have the kind of magic it would take to cast a spell like that. And I was watching it the whole time, it didn’t have a chance to cast anything!_

And yet, when he tentatively righted himself and grabbed the knife off its stomach, he felt the phantom brush of knuckles against his own skin, the lifting of a weight.

_Shit._

He didn’t know how it had done it—he’d never even heard of a mage or sorcerer managing a spell like that, and elementals weren’t much for concrete magics. They could wield their elements without a second thought, and well enough that even the most powerful human mage couldn’t wrest control from them, but that should’ve been it. An actual casting, especially one done without gems or incantations, would be more impossible for it than for Dean. And Dean was a shit caster.

But poking its arm with the tip of the blade confirmed his suspicions: the sensation echoed back to him as an invisible prick in the exact same place. Given that and the continued pain beneath his breastbone, killing the elemental himself was pretty clearly off the table.

That meant Dean had to abandon all of his former options and turn to a new, terrible option. The only option he had left, but one he’d desperately wanted to avoid. It wasn’t quite as bad as getting killed by the creature, but it was a pretty close second.

He called his dad.

\ \ \

By the time Gordon’s large, boxy all-terrain vehicle rolled up, Dean had come up with a lot more questions and no more answers. For instance:

Why had the cuts from Dean’s knife healed, both on the elemental’s hand and on its chest, but its wings remained mangled? And why had the cuts on Dean’s hand healed so quickly and without so much as a scar? Would banishing the elemental have any effect on the link between them? What about binding its power inside wards, or having a mage crystallize it into a gem? Would he survive if someone else killed it?

Just how screwed was he?

The fury on John Winchester’s face when he slammed out of the car answered the last question, at least. _If this thing or Sam’s girlfriend don’t end up killing me, Dad will._

“What the hell were you thinking!” John didn’t seem worried about the elemental on the ground between him and his son. True, it was still passed out, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t wake at any time. Dean really wanted to get it secured before that happened, and that meant they didn’t have time for one of his dad’s rages.

“I don’t know if the subjugation took,” he said instead of answering. It was only a deflection, delaying the chewing out he was due—and he was due, he didn’t deny that; this was a fuck-up on a massive scale, and really not needed on top of everything they were dealing with with Sam. But he’d take his lashings later without complaint; there were more urgent things to take care of first. “You got someone who can lock it in a ward?”

His dad snorted. “Yeah, Dean. I figured it would be a monumentally stupid idea to show up to a confrontation with one of the most volatile elemental types by myself, without a mage or any other backup.”

Dean winced, but he deserved that. Bobby came around the other side of the car, shaking his head at Dean but not piling on other than a muttered, “Idjit.” Then he got a look at the elemental’s wings and whistled. “That thing ain’t lookin’ so good. The hell did you do to it?”

“Nothing! Not for lack of trying, but that was after it fried itself.”

“Huh.”

Bobby walked three circles around the elemental, clockwise then counter-clockwise then back again. On the last round, he fished in one of the pockets of his worn leather satchel and pulled out a handful of mixed gems. They were pebbles, smoothly polished but none of them bigger than Dean’s pinky nail, and Bobby dropped one every other step as he retraced his path through the desert. When he was done, tiny amethysts, rubies, and garnets formed a dotted perimeter within the circular channel carved in the sand by his feet.

Glad as he was to have Bobby there, the sight didn’t make Dean feel any better about the trouble he’d caused. That was a whole lot of supplies wasted on his stupidity and this stubborn bastard of an elemental. _It woulda been worth it if it worked,_ he told himself. But it hadn’t worked, it wasn’t worth it, and it made their already complicated troubles a whole lot worse. When he finally figured out a way to safely gank this thing, he was going to enjoy it.

“It starts moving, you pull my ass outta the circle,” Bobby warned them with a stern glower. “I ain’t looking to get zapped.”

Without waiting for their acknowledgement, he stepped over the line and crouched next to the creature’s head. His hand disappeared in the leather pouch again and emerged full of a coarsely ground mix of black and purple powder. Salts or sands, maybe both—Dean wasn’t sure. Bobby sprinkled it in a smaller circle around the elemental’s head, crossing over its neck to complete the ring, then turned to make an X over its chest with the rest.

Dean twitched and tried to ignore the tickle.

Despite their concerns, the elemental still hadn’t shown any signs of recovering its wits. Bobby got to his feet, groaning like an old man, and carefully stepped back over the spell circle. Dean could feel his dad glaring at him as Bobby started the incantation, but he kept his own eyes on the elemental. Bobby’s voice rose and the stones started to glow; first in their respective red and purple hues, then brighter and brighter until it was pure light, stark white and painful to stare at straight on. It flared into a dome above the elemental when Bobby reached the end of his chanting, then dropped away.

The stones had vanished, nothing but small dents in the sand remaining where they’d been. The powder was gone, too, but it had left behind dark marks on the elemental’s skin; black lines, one crossing each way across its chest and one like a collar around its throat.

“Okay, okay.” Bobby wiped sweat from his forehead and made a face, then looked to Dean. “That’s done. Feel any different?”

 _One way to find out._ Dean edged closer and nudged the elemental’s leg with his shoe. _Shit._

Bobby’s frown meant he could probably read the answer on Dean’s face, but he still said it. “Nah. Whatever the fuck it did to me, the connection’s still there.”

“Balls.”

Gordon finally made his appearance then, with the magic over. He was a bit of a purist even by hunter standards; he knew better than to start shit with Bobby over magic use and spellcasting, but he didn’t like being around it, either. Like Dean’s dad, he preferred the straight-forward physical methods—which explained him pulling a set of cold iron restraints out of the back of the car. They jangled and clanked loudly in his arms as he carried them over the the elemental.

“Might as well, since we’ve got them.” He flashed Dean a smile that was only slightly barbed, then set about binding the elemental’s wrists together, then its ankles on a slightly longer chain. No doubt he’d be getting some shit for what he’d done from that direction, too, but at least Gordon wasn’t personally pissed at him.

Dean shivered at the ghost shackles locking around him and had to move his hands away from each other just to reassure himself he still could. He risked a glance at his dad, but John had finally stopped glaring at him to watch Gordon secure the creature.

“Got anything for the wings?” John asked when Gordon finished with the other limbs.

Sitting back on his heels, Gordon looked back at the car thoughtfully. “Probably got something that’ll work. No need to take any chances, right?”

While Gordon retrieved another length of iron chain to strap the elemental’s wings down to its back, John brushed past Dean without a word. Dean stared after him. _This is bad. This is so, so bad._

“He’ll calm down,” Bobby said, patting Dean’s shoulder. “Just give him a couple years.”

“Yeah, right. Thanks,” Dean grumbled, but followed Bobby to the car. His foot caught on something hard half-buried in the sand and he looked down to see the twist of crimson and clear glass. In all the furor he’d forgotten about it, forged from his blood and the elemental’s lightning mingled in the sand.

Leave it behind or take it with him. Two options, again. Neither of which he liked. Again. It gave him the creeps. But at least if he had it, no one else could use it against him. And maybe there was something to it, part of the elemental’s trick to get Dean’s subjugation to backfire like it had. So, glancing around to make sure no one was looking—Bobby and his dad were in the car, Gordon was still binding the thing’s wings—he scooped it up and shoved it into one of his bigger pockets.

He’d hitched a ride out to the edge of the dunes with the weather witch who told him about the elemental living in the lee of the Colorado Rockies, then hiked in from there. The plan had always been to call for a ride back, he’d just thought it would be under more successful circumstances instead of being barely short of a rescue. It was Gordon’s car, and Bobby got into the passenger seat, which left Dean no choice but to climb into the back next to his dad. It was going to be a fun ride back to the bunker.

“Oh, sure!” Gordon called after them. “Leave me to carry the monster by myself!”

Dean started to get back out, feeling guilty, but Gordon waved him away. “I got it, just giving you a hard time. Besides, I can drag it most of the way.”

The elemental being pulled across the sand wasn’t the most comfortable feeling in the world, but Dean gritted his teeth and sucked it up. Then Gordon hoisted it up into the trunk and—

“Ow! Fucking watch it, dude,” Dean complained, rubbing at his arm.

Gordon’s apology was totally insincere, but not malicious. More pleasant by far than Dean’s dad vibrating with barely contained wrath next to him. Not that Dean blamed him. He’d fucked up big time, but he was gonna fix it.

_Fix myself, fix Sam, save the world. No big deal. No idea how I’m going to do any of it, especially since that thing was my best shot at freeing Sammy, but okay. I’ll make it happen._

Failure wasn’t an option. He’d find another way.

\ \ \

They made it most of the way back to middle-of-nowhere Kansas—ten minutes back to the highway, another twenty passing through charmed acceleration stops—before the elemental woke up. Dean knew before the rest of them, because he had the dubious pleasure of uncontrollable panic slamming into his mind again, wild and desperate and, he was finally sure, not his.

Knowing that wasn’t enough to stop the flow. He bent double in his seat, trying to block out the noise, but throwing his arms over his head did nothing when it was coming from the inside. Or not quite inside, because it was the elemental’s fear and pain trying to push his own thoughts to the edges; still not something that could be stopped by blocking his ears.

It had hit him out of nowhere, but at least this time he understood a little better what was happening to him. Separating his mind from the elemental’s proved too difficult of a task, but he could identify the thoughts and feelings that weren’t his even if he couldn’t silence them.

The creature was in pain. Dean didn’t feel it, though, not like he’d felt the cuts and bruises and chains. It was more like an awareness of the elemental’s suffering than sharing in it himself, which was great: as far as he could tell, it was in agony.

It reacted badly to that thought, spiralling up into distress so vivid and overpowering that Dean got lost, thrown out of his own mind. His arms pulled against manacles that held them fast, but he tugged and twisted until he felt the bones shatter. Part of him screamed and another part didn’t, and he didn’t know which was which or where the divide was.

A hand gripped the back of his neck as the weight of the chains smashed his broken wrists further. There were voices in the distance, somewhere outside him, yelling. He couldn’t make out the words. Then more hands, pulling, holding, dragging him with them on legs that stumbled along despite being pulled up short by heavy restraints each time he tried to kick out.

Down some stairs, which he couldn’t manage on his own, then a hallway, then the voices started to resolve into an argument (“—just knock it back out—” “—and what’ll that do to Dean, you figure—”), then he was dropped onto something soft. A bed, pillows light as down, blankets fluffed up so he could fall into them like an embrace.

It quieted the storm in his head. Comfort, familiarity—it was his bed, his room, he was home—grounded him back in his own thoughts instead of the elemental’s, and even the elemental had stopped panicking for the moment, taken by surprise by the feeling it must have shared with Dean.

 _Probably doesn’t know what a bed is,_ he thought. _Sleeps on fucking rocks or something._

Denial cracked through his head like a splitting migraine. Dean clutched at the sheets to try and shut out the thoughts flooding into him. Soft sand, layers of feathers and grass—sense memory, not images, but no less visceral for not being able to see the nature-made bedding that felt in his mind as comfortable as his physical memory foam.

Then came a word, a rumbling thunder of a storm on the horizon: **Bed.**

Dean snorted. _That’s not a bed, it’s a hole in the ground._

He sat up with the realization of what had just happened, ignoring the concerned looks from his dad and Bobby, and scanned the room. Just the three of them. “Holy shit.”

His dad leaned over him, hand on Dean’s shoulder and worry replacing the anger that had been there before. It was a reassuring change; he hadn’t fucked up badly enough to be written off entirely. “Dean, what’s going on?”

“It’s in my head.”

That earned him flat glares from both men. “Yeah, we kinda got that impression already,” Bobby said dryly. “What with how you told us, and then with all the dramatics and all.”

“No, I mean it—it’s not just there, it’s doing it on purpose.”

Anger and resentment flared up, bringing with them a renewed awareness of suffering. They belonged to the elemental, not him, but he still felt himself being affected. Between his rising temper and the thing’s primal mental (and possibly physical) screaming, his control started to slip away again. He curled in on himself, chewing back his own snarl of helpless rage.

His dad’s hand fell away, then after a moment he snapped, “Get it out of here.” Dean fought his eyes up; John was on the phone. “Take it, I don’t know—no, wait. Up to Samuel’s compound. I want it in the highest class cage, but remember—”

The rest of the conversation was lost to the tempest raging in Dean’s head, but he could tell when Gordon stopped arguing and started driving because it felt like his body was slammed into a wall. Or into the side of the cargo trunk, as the car accelerated. It was enough to send him spinning out again, blown into the useless corners of his own mind as the elemental’s baser emotions took over.

Then Bobby was right there, pressing something earthen and salty to his lips and muttering, “Just a bit, there you go,” and it all faded.

\ \ \

For the second time that day, Dean wobbled blearily out of unconsciousness to a host of discomforts. Most notably, while he was on his clean and comfortable bed instead of getting sand down his pants, his hands were cuffed behind him. Since he was lying on his side, the combination of his weight and the restricted movement wrenched his shoulder halfway out of its socket. Struggling to sit up without much help from his arm, he saw that he was alone in the room.

Also, one of his legs had been shackled to something under the bed.

 _Really, Dad?_ he thought sourly. _This all seems pretty fucking unnecessary._

**My thoughts exactly.**

Dean jerked around, unbalanced, and fell out of the bed without his arms to catch him. “Ow. Shit.”

 **Hunter,** the elemental snarled in his head, because it definitely wasn’t in the room with him, **I’m in enough pain from your stupidity already. Stop adding to it.**

It was in his head, but it also wasn’t. Aside from what seemed to be specifically directed—thoughts? comments?—he couldn’t feel the same whirlwind of emotion it had been forcing into him earlier. His mind was, more or less, his own. Relieving as that was, he would’ve liked it a lot more to have the thing gone entirely.

**I couldn’t agree more. If you think I want to be trapped in your small, violent mind; if you think I’m forcing any of this, you’re more of a fool than I took you for.**

“Stop doing that!”

 **I’d love to,** it told him as Bobby flung open the door, frowning in concern or consternation, which were the same frown on him. **But since you’re so loud and undisciplined that you’re shoving your stream of consciousness at me nonstop, you make it difficult. And given that you enslaved me and tried to murder me, I see no reason to humor your further demands.**

Bobby was talking, but Dean couldn’t hear him over the elemental’s rumbling. How was it hearing everything he thought when he only heard what it clearly wanted him to hear?

It didn’t answer. _Was it lying? Maybe it just wants me to think it’s more in my head than I am in its, that would give it an advantage._

 **Maybe ‘it’ doesn’t appreciate being considered a thing,** it shot back, proving him wrong with as much anger and righteousness as it could push along the thankfully lessened connection of their minds; it was still enough to send Dean reeling. **Maybe ‘it’ has a name and an identity and a life outside of being your tool or your prey.**

A hard shake knocked him back to reality, the physical part of it at least, and he focused in on Bobby at last. “Dean! The hell’s the matter with you? Is it still messing with your head?”

“It’s… talking,” he answered shakily. The elemental sent a dismissive huff his way, which he shook off with some difficulty. “It’s not overwhelming like it was before, but it’s still connected. I think I’m only getting what it wants me to, but I can’t keep it out the same way.”

“Balls. So can it hear me?”

“I don’t know,” Dean said slowly. The elemental didn’t chime in one way or the other, not that Dean expected it to help him after everything.

**That might be the first intelligent thought you’ve had in your entire life.**

“Hey, fuck you! No, not—not you, Bobby. I told you, it’s in my head.”

Bobby smacked him in the ear, though not too hard. “Well don’t damn well listen to it. You know why it makes your daddy nervous to have something that can influence you like that.”

Scowling, Dean rubbed the side of his head against his shoulder to brush away the swat. “It’s not like that. I’m not gonna end up like—”

He cut himself off. The elemental knew some of what was going on; Dean had had to tell it to get it to agree to the deal in the first place. But he hadn’t shared all the details, and he didn’t plan to. All the elemental needed to know was that it was killing a demon for Dean, and in return Dean would help it relocate to an island off the coast where it could storm ’til it died without bothering real people. As far as Dean was concerned, that was the next best thing to killing it. He might’ve done it even without—that thing he wasn’t thinking about.

 **Your brother’s been seduced by a demon.** It was mocking him. **And she’s turned him to dark magics. You need me to kill her so that you won’t have to kill him.**

“Stop that! Shit.”

He should’ve known better, really. The elemental had been in his head the whole time, and trying not to think about a thing was pretty much the same thing as thinking about it. If he kept making that mistake, he wouldn’t have any secrets left.

**You don’t—**

He slammed back as hard as he could, focusing all his attention on the thought, _Shut up!_ To his surprise and delight, it worked. He could feel the elemental’s hateful scorn lash back at him, but no specific thoughts.

To Bobby, aloud, he said, “How come it can hear everything I’m thinking now, but I can’t do the same? Or maybe,” he added as the thought—definitely his own—struck him, “I can and it just doesn’t have much going on up there?”

The onslaught of stormy rage that earned him only ended when Bobby brought him back to himself (and sent the elemental back to itself) with a painfully pinched earlobe. He was wearing a look Dean had seen far too often, the kind that suggested Dean got exactly what he deserved for being a dumbass.

“Same reason Sam’s a grade-A sorcerer and you can’t hardly manage a banishing without half the work done for you in advance, I figure.”

“What, there are nerd elementals, too?”

“Discipline, ya idjit.” Bobby smacked him again, unfair when Dean couldn’t even defend himself, much less retaliate.

The elemental growled, **Stop that,** and Dean rolled his eyes. Like it was his fault—he wasn’t hitting himself.

**All of this is your fault.**

_The fuck it is! This is on you and whatever bullshit you pulled to stop the subjugation._

**I did no such thing. You cast the binding that caused this. The fact that you aren’t strong enough to control me the way you planned is your own fault.**

_What? Look, I did a perfectly standard subjugation, not some—what do you think this was, some attempt at mind control or something?_

**It would serve your needs and you’ve demonstrated no regard for my autonomy.**

_I have no regard for you because you don’t deserve shit from me but a knife to the heart, so you can be damn sure that means I’m not gonna wanna get myself stuck in the head of some winged freak of nature._

The flash of hurt that lanced into him was a shocking reminder of the damage the elemental had sustained; shocking mostly because he’d managed to forget about the creature’s mangled wings. It hadn’t, of course; Dean realized that was the source of the pain the elemental felt that he didn’t. He’d lost the impression of it, but it flared back as the elemental lost control of its side of the bond momentarily.

Was it because of the location that he didn’t feel it the way he’d felt the other injuries? He didn’t have wings, so it couldn’t be reflected on him. And why weren’t they healing the way the rest of its injuries did?

The creature didn’t respond, which he told himself was a good thing. He wanted it out of his head. If there was a sour twist of guilt churning his guts, that must have been its doing, too.

“So how do we fix this?” he asked Bobby, shoving the unease aside.

“Fix what?” Bobby crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows.

Dean scowled. “The monster in my head, what do you think?”

“What I mean is, we don’t even know what the blazes is going on with you yet, much less how we can get it fixed. So you’re just gonna have to be patient and try to work on your control.”

“While I’m chained up in my own room? Bobby, that’s bull—”

“That’s the only thing we can do. I don’t like it either, but we can’t risk it right now, Dean. We don’t got a lot of room to risk anything.”

“Yeah, and what if I gotta piss?”

Bobby snorted. “You can reach the sink,” he said without a trace of sympathy and started to leave.

“I can—what? Bobby? Bobby!” he yelled at the closing door. “I’m not shitting in the sink!”

\ \ \

**Imagine a wall.**

Dean startled out of his irate daydreams. He’d been locked up for hours, no more visits from Bobby, no sign of his dad. They hadn’t even let him have his phone; he was bored out of his mind and not too far off from making the decision of whether he was really willing to pee in the sink.

The elemental had been silent since Dean made it mad about the wings, but of course it had been too much to hope for it to have really been gone.

_What?_

He regretted the question as soon as he’d thought it. Better not to engage, to ignore it until Bobby came up with something. Maybe it would shut up again.

It must have heard that thought, but didn’t react other than to repeat itself. **A wall. Solid. Impenetrable. As thick as you are. Picture it in your mind.**

_Why the hell would I do that?_

The lights didn’t flicker, they couldn’t have; the creature was in Mississippi and bound a few ways besides, but something about its tone made it seem like they must’ve. **Because if I have to hear you singing about being thunderstruck one more time, I’m going to see what happens to you when I choke myself on my own tongue.**

Dean wasn’t sure which was worse: that mental image or being caught with that song stuck in his head, given the context. _Why should I trust you?_

**You seem to be as short on other options as I am. Do you want to save your brother from the demon, and the world from your brother, or not?**

Of course he did, and he also really, really wanted the elemental out of his brain. That earned him a dispassionately rumbled, **The feeling is completely mutual.** So he stared at the thick cement wall of his room and thought about it.

 _Okay,_ he thought after a while, _now what?_

It didn’t answer.

_Hello? Uh, elemental?_

Still nothing.

_Is that it? Was that really all it took and I’m done now? Awesome! Just need to wait for Bobby—_

**Of course that’s not it. You have the patience of a child. No wonder your casting is pathetic.**

_I really fucking wish I could kill that dick._

He hadn’t meant that to carry through, but of course it did.

**Unfortunately for both of us, murder is currently out of the question. Go back to your wall.**

Not bothering to rein in his hateful thoughts, he did. He ended up drifting to sleep as he glared at the pocked grey wall.

\ \ \

In the morning, Bobby woke him with breakfast and news. Or a lack of news. “I’m still searching,” he said with a sigh, “but so far coming up with nada. Congrats, boy, you managed to fuck this up in a way no one’s fucked this up before.”

Dean rubbed at his wrists, which had at least been freed. Bobby insisted he couldn’t go without the leg shackle, though: “You’re too good with door locks, can’t trust you to stay put otherwise.”

“I’m me, Bobby! Yeah, there’s a dick with wings talkin’ in my head, but it’s not doing anything more than that. And I’m working on shutting it out—”

That got Bobby’s attention, with a sharp gaze that made Dean wish he could take it back.

“How’s that, exactly?”

“Just, you know. Meditation?” _Like Bobby’ll buy that._

Something like amusement fizzled in the back of his mind for a moment before vanishing so quickly it left him dizzy. He didn’t have time to chase the feeling, though, because he had to duck a smack from Bobby; the glare, he couldn’t avoid.

“Damn it, Dean. You’re listening to it! This is why. This is exactly why we gotta keep you here and safe until we figure out how we can gank it without ganking you. It’s getting to you already and I’m not—” Bobby’s voice cracked, and though he knew Bobby would call him twelve names and insist it was just the lighting, Dean would swear he saw the old guy tearing up. “I’m not losing both of you boys.”

“Hey, no.” Dean dropped his mostly empty plate on the bed and grabbed at Bobby’s arm. “You don’t give up on Sammy! You hear me? You’re not losing either of us, because I’m fine and we’re gonna bring him home.”

Bobby pulled away. “You ain’t fine, and you ain’t gonna do anything, thanks to this mess you landed yourself in. I know you meant well, but—blazes, Dean, you couldn’t’ve run this one by me first?”

“It was the best option I had,” he argued, knowing it was weak when even he didn’t believe it anymore; not with how badly it had gone wrong. But still—“We were getting nowhere against Ruby on her own, never mind once she got Sam’s power behind her. You were the one who always told me the only thing stronger than a fully entrenched demon is an elemental or a whole coven of dark witches, right?”

“Yeah, so you knew to be careful with ’em! Not let one shove itself in your measly excuse for a brain. Blast it, Dean, I thought you knew better than that.”

He had, which made it sting, but nothing else had worked. Sam had been under Ruby’s influence for too long, his dad and some of the other hunters were already talking about him like he was lost. It felt like he and Bobby were the only ones still trying, and even Bobby was losing hope; he’d had to do something.

Desperation had made him ignore his misgivings, but even then the worst he’d expected was getting murdered by a raging, wild elemental.

Thunder cracked inside his head and he flinched.

“It was a basic subjugation,” he complained to Bobby instead of letting himself react further. _Think about walls._ “I might not be much with magic, but I’ve done those before.”

He had bite the inside of his cheek to ignore another rumble of displeasure coming across from the elemental’s mind: **Slavery.**

Either it wanted him to feel it—as if he gave a shit about its opinion of him—or its control wasn’t as good as it pretended. He wasn’t sure if the second option would make things better or worse for him; it might give him an advantage in overpowering its influence in his mind, but it could also mean that he wouldn’t be able to block himself off from it as much as he wanted to. He was just figuring this _be a wall_ shit out, and the creature had been doing it—

Well. He didn’t actually know how long the creature had been doing it.

“You never tried subjugating something this powerful,” Bobby was arguing. “Can you think of anything weird that happened, anything it did?”

The blood-glass was still in his pocket. Dean was surprised no one had noticed and confiscated it, but then, they were used to odd bulges and protrusions in everyone’s pockets. Hunters always had weird crap on them. But he was more interested in the stuff actually going on in his mind, and maybe he didn’t need to give Bobby yet another thing to lecture him about just now.

He cut Bobby off. “Do elementals have some kinda hive mind or telepathy shit they do on their own?”

Turned out that didn’t really save him from Bobby’s judgement. “You’re just asking this now?” he scoffed, crossing his arms and glaring at Dean. “You don’t even know that much about elementals and you’re going around tangling with them.”

“Come on, Bobby.”

After heaving a dramatic sigh, Bobby relented and answered, “Nah. They really ain’t got much going on aside from the, you know, elemental crap. Telepathy’s some high level shit, they don’t have that kinda juice. No real need for it, either—tend to keep to themselves ’cept for mates sometimes, and they got vocal cords.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, scowling as he remembered how argumentative it had been over the subjugation in the first place. “They sure do.”

It didn’t make sense for it to have fought the binding so much if it was planning to use it against him—unless, he realized, that was a back-up plan. It didn’t want to be subjugated, but if it had to be, it would fuck him up in the process? He could almost respect that. He wouldn’t have given in easy, either.

But then, he was human.

“Could you have made a link like this?” he asked Bobby.

Bobby snorted. “Like what? We still don’t even know what’s going on with you, much less what made it happen. But no,” he added to forestall Dean’s opening mouth, “nothing even close. I’m decent enough at what I do, but I’m not that hot shit. Mages in general, we don’t like stuff mucking around in our minds. All we got, you know? That’s why we prefer crystallizing magical things instead of subjugation. All the power, none of the sentience.

“A real powerful sorcerer can force his will on another human for maybe a couple minutes, passively listen in on your thoughts for a while longer than that, but it’s still a huge power drain. Ain’t no way it could last as long as your thing has, especially going both ways.”

Bobby reached out to ruffle Dean’s hair like he hadn’t in years, not since Dean was a little kid worried for his dad while John was on a hunt without them. “I don’t like this shit, kid. I’m worried about what that thing’s doing in your head. And I’m pissed as all getout at you for getting yourself into it.”

As Bobby left, the weight of his disappointment hung heavier on Dean than the iron chains he could feel weighing down the elemental.

When Dean had hit his surly teenage years, he’d decided he was too cool for physical affection, too grown up, and ducked away when Bobby tried to offer it. He hadn’t noticed—or, more likely, hadn’t cared at the time, too caught up in his own macho bullshit—the hurt in Bobby’s eyes.

 **He cares deeply for you,** the elemental observed.

It sounded more curious than cruel, but Dean was hurting and he needed to lash out. The creature was as good a target as any; better, even. It was that thing that had gotten him into this mess to begin with. He didn’t buy its insistence it hadn’t done anything. It had to have, because he sure hadn’t, had no idea what he even would’ve done, and they were the only two who’d been in a position to influence the subjugation.

_Yeah, caring is a thing human families do. You wouldn’t understand._

**You’re right,** it snapped back, imperious and roaring like a stormcloud trapped in a glass jar. **I wouldn’t, because my family was all killed or enslaved by your kind before my first molt. You’re just as bad as the rest of them, and you’ll get no pity from me.**

Dean paced the small space he was allowed to the side of his bed, rage pooling deep in his stomach. Some of it might not have been his; the elemental had more control over its side of the bond, but it had lost that before when it got worked up. Whether it was Dean’s alone or not, it grew and bubbled in a bitter flood until he felt like it would melt him from the inside out unless he loosed it.

_I didn’t do shit to you! I should’ve. I should’ve killed you right there, put you down like the sick beast you are._

**I’m not a beast,** it roared, sounding pretty fucking bestial. **I am not a creature or a thing. I am an elemental, but that is no less than being a human—it’s so much more. You outnumber us yet you fear us, and well you should. I let you live as a courtesy, one I would not—will not—extend again.**

Dean bared his teeth in a snarl that felt too primal to be his, but satisfying nevertheless. _I’m not afraid of monsters. Monsters are afraid of me._

Dean’s head split open and he screamed with it, collapsing to the floor and striking his head again on the bed on the way down. The pain of the second hit was less, even though he was vaguely aware he hadn’t hit it the first time. Things got even fuzzier after that; he couldn’t keep up until Gordon burst in, looking ready for the worst. He knelt next to Dean and checked his head, then said something that Dean couldn’t understand through the haze.

Shaking his head in the face of Dean’s incomprehension, Gordon lifted him with a bit of difficulty and got him settled on the bed, the uninjured side of his head resting on the pillow. He seemed to be talking to himself after that, but Dean thought he heard something about putting him down, which was weird since Gordon wasn’t holding him anymore.

\ \ \

The elemental, it turned out, had bashed its head open against the wall of its cell. Cracked its skull damn near all the way open, lightning sparking everywhere; an injury it could heal from with ease, but Dean might not have. The fucker had done it just to hurt him.

It was, while not exactly apologetic, also not proud. Though it was quick to blame Dean. **You need to improve your control. My anger feeds off yours, and yours off mine, until we’re both crazy with it. I would not have acted so without the influence of the bond.**

With his concussion healed and fussed over by Bobby, Dean was feeling better enough that he was inclined to be charitable. He recalled saying—thinking—some things that may have been a bit… unhelpful to the situation.

 **No different than is usual for you,** it retorted. **After all, you still think of me as an it. I’m a thing to you even in the best mood—or, at least, the best mood of yours that I’ve experienced. Don’t feel guilty for one instance of treating me like a dumb animal unless you intend to stop the practice all together; it’s disingenuous and insulting.**

It was… The thing was, supernatural creatures had always been creatures to Dean. They weren’t human. They weren’t people. He was a hunter, after all, and he didn’t gank people. Even the ones that looked human, the elementals and djinn and shifters and vamps—none of them actually were. He couldn’t change their appearances, at least not until he’d killed them, but getting rid of other humanizing features made it easier.

But it was getting harder, the longer he spent with the elemental connected to his thoughts. That was probably what his dad and the others were concerned about, but the more he talked to it, the more he struggled to contain it to that non-person category.

It had said it had a name.

 **Castiel.** The mental voice was soft, as though coaxing a small and scared mammal closer. Dean resented the implication a little, but he also understood it. He felt small and vulnerable, questioning pretty much all of his life so far. **I’m a male of my species, just like you, and my name is Castiel.**

 _Castiel,_ he thought.

Tentative hope washed over him like a sprinkling of warm spring rain, unexpected but not unwelcome. He couldn’t tell if it belonged to him or to the—to Castiel, and for the first time, he found he didn’t mind. It was a pleasant, calming feeling, soothing away all the tension he hadn’t known he’d—they’d?—been carrying along with their anger.

_I’m Dean, which I guess you probably knew. Dean Winchester._

The calm evaporated into blankness and Dean tensed up at the sudden withdrawal. What could he possibly have done or said—or thought—to set it off that time? He was just introducing himself, that seemed to be the thing to do after Castiel gave his name. Even if Castiel was bound to know it already from listening in to his talks with Bobby and the general goings-on in his head, it was polite.

And Dean thought maybe they ought to try politeness, since the opposite hadn’t been working very well for them and their magically interconnected consciousnesses or whatever. But reciprocation from Castiel was nowhere to be found, and Dean started to grow irritated at the lack of it.

_Castiel? Hey, you still there?_

No response, not even a flash of feeling. Castiel gave him nothing. Maybe he’d been stupid and reckless again; just like with his blood, there wasn’t much an elemental should be able to do with his name—it wasn’t even his full name. But he’d been wrong last time he made that assumption. He pulled out the twist of red and clear glass from his pocket and frowned, turning it over in his hands.

It might not have been the weirdest thing Dean had ever seen, but it was pretty close. That said, it was also just… pretty. It wasn’t natural, that was for sure, but it was amazing. He’d seen all kinds of crystals in his life, and he’d never come across anything like what his blood had fused into when Castiel’s lightning hit the sand. It mesmerized him, the way it caught the light—each branch glinting at a different angle, the varied saturations of crimson glowing like they were lit from within.

He couldn’t let that distract him from the possibility that it was dangerous, though. It was still the only thing he could think of to explain why the subjugation had gone so wrong, even if he didn’t know how. Even if he was less convinced than he’d been that it was intentional—

And why was he less convinced of that? Because Castiel had said so.

_And I’m supposed to just trust that? Especially when I know he’s got access to my thoughts. Shit, Winchester, get ahold of yourself. You can’t keep doing this._

Castiel still didn’t appear to protest the accusation. In fact, Dean’s head felt clearer than it had since the botched ritual, and he realized with a chill of apprehension that maybe Bobby and his dad hadn’t been so misguided in their worries after all. He felt different when Castiel wasn’t communicating with him through the bond. Whether it was words, emotions, or even shared pain, Dean felt more when Castiel was involved. Everything had a bigger impact on him, positive or negative. And maybe that was the echo back and forth that Castiel had talked about, or maybe he should stop believing a single fucking word that thing said.

_Nothing to say? Not going to weigh in here on what a stupid human I am or how unfair I’m being when you’re just a poor, helpless mythical creature with the power to murder armies?_

When even that didn’t get him a reaction, Dean started to feel hopeful again. It wasn’t the soft ‘friendship’ bullshit Castiel had forced on him earlier; this hope was triumphant. This was post-hunt milkshakes and a monster’s bones in a shallow grave. It was his dad letting him take lead on a job and everything running smoothly.

“Bobby!” he shouted as loud as he could without hurting his throat. And louder, “Bobby!”

The man slammed through the door so enthusiastically that Dean was surprised it didn’t break. He had his shotgun in one hand with the barrel braced over his other arm; those fingers clutched a brown leather pouch that was sure to have some mix of herbs and salts in it. What good Bobby thought any of that would do against something that could get to him through all the warding on their bunker, Dean didn’t bother trying to imagine. It was touching, kinda. Ridiculous, but touching.

Before Bobby could get grumpy at Dean over his own overreaction, Dean told him, “I think it’s gone.”

Lowering the gun but not his eyebrows, Bobby asked, “Come again?”

“The elemental. The bond. It’s not there.”

“Not there, or just not talking?”

Dean considered for another moment, assessing his own headspace as best he could, and said, “I think not there. It cut off real abruptly, and there hasn’t been anything since.”

“Could just be playing games,” argued Bobby. “Tricking you.”

Shaking his head, Dean leaned forward on his elbows. “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s as in control as it tried to act like it was. It’s as new to this as I am—you said yourself, they don’t do this kinda magic or link or whatever.”

“Maybe it just don’t got anything to share right now.”

“No, it’s more than that. It had a hard time keeping me blocked out when it got emotional, even when it seemed to want to. And I’ve—”

He stopped, but Bobby heard what he didn’t say anyway.

“You’ve been provoking it,” he accused. “Blast it, Dean!”

“Okay, yeah, but it’s not reacting! I mean nothing, Bobby. Maybe it just, I don’t know, wore off or something.”

Though he still looked skeptical as ever, Bobby said, “All right. All right, we can give your grandpa a call and see if he can tell us anything, but that’s it. You’re still in here until I say otherwise.”

As Bobby pulled out his phone and dialed, something with sharp points poked at Dean’s thigh. He looked down, expecting the twisted blood glass that he’d dropped when Bobby burst in, but saw nothing. Then energy jolted through him, like a shock of pure adrenaline revitalizing his body. He felt more alive than he had in years, alert and reckless, blood pumping in anticipation of something. Of everything.

Then the wonderful feeling stopped, and in its place came a stabbing, tearing pain that ripped a yell from his throat as he tried to flinch away. He couldn’t, because there was nothing to escape from; but still, whatever it was buried deeper and deeper into the muscle of his leg and then twisted there.

“Dean!” Bobby was beside him, batting his hands away from where they uselessly tried to shield a wound that wasn’t his. He managed to wrangle Dean’s pants down enough to reassure himself that there was no actual damage, then started yelling into his phone. Dean couldn’t be sure exactly what the topic of conversation was, just like he couldn’t come up with a joke about Bobby buying him dinner first, even though that had been his go-to in the past.

Dean could take a lot of damage. He’d been stabbed, clawed, bitten, even shot once when a werewolf got hold of his gun in a scuffle. But this was more than just pain; he was also getting hit with Castiel’s helpless fury and a backlash of everything the elemental had been holding back from him. Apparently Castiel’s control was better than Dean gave him credit for, because he’d slammed down on the bond as soon as Samuel Campbell had entered his cell.

Why he knew who Dean’s grandfather was and why he’d tried to block Dean out both became clear as he heard Samuel, in the flood of Castiel’s memories, say, “Well, look what’s all grown up. You’re gonna wish you’d never gotten away.”

Dean didn’t get specifics after that. The pain pulled back, its source now identifiable as Samuel with a pronged cattle prod. When Castiel hadn’t been hurt by the electricity, Samuel had used its points to stab him instead. But Dean didn’t get any more flashes, because as the makeshift weapon withdrew, Castiel regained enough mindfulness to stop what had apparently been an unintentional rebound of connection across the denied bond.

Dean’s thigh still hurt like a bitch, but he could handle that when he wasn’t being overwhelmed by everything else.

“—your own shitting grandson!” Bobby shouted into the phone. “Yeah? Well someone’s gotta, and it clearly ain’t gonna be you. Oh, go screw yourself.”

Disconnecting with a glower, he looked back at Dean. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just peachy.”

Rubbing at the ache in his leg—over his pants, which he pulled up because Bobby’d already had enough of a show—didn’t do much to relieve it. But it did seem to be fading, maybe due to Castiel’s healing?

The only answer he got was the slow dissipation of pain.

\ \ \

Castiel didn’t talk to him again for two days.

It wasn’t a complete shut-out like those few minutes before they’d been stabbed. If Dean had to bet, he’d put money on Castiel not wanting to deal with the forceful backlash when he gave into the link again. So he could tell that Castiel was still there, deliberately refusing to engage but connected enough to silently disapprove of everything Dean did.

He didn’t entirely mind the quiet, either; he’d been given a lot to think about, and it was better for him to be able to do that on his own. Even if he did sometimes find himself wishing Castiel would give him definite answers for some of his questions, he still hadn’t decided if he would trust them.

Trusting Castiel in general was up in the air.

But he could admit he might’ve been a bit hasty to assume the worst of Castiel yet again. They’d been down that road and it ended in a bitch of a headache for both of them. Jumping to the same unfavorable conclusions could lead to more of the same. It might still come to that in the end, but if it did, Dean wanted to make an enemy of his mental companion on his own terms. Only if Castiel earned it himself, not because of his dad’s or grandad’s opinions.

His grandfather’s opinion was pretty clear, and it made Dean nauseous in a way he didn’t think he could pin on Castiel; it was wholly his own feeling. He’d killed his fair share of supernatural creatures, less powerful elementals included, but he’d never tortured one. He couldn’t imagine wanting to.

Even djinn or vamps, who could drag out their victims’ suffering just for fun, it had never occurred to him to return the experience. That wasn’t what hunting was about; despite some of the things he’d hurled at Castiel when their combined rage had seen him at his worst, he didn’t do it to punish the monsters. He just wanted to keep people safe from them.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t known Samuel didn’t have quite the same view of things, though. Dean and his dad, and Sam before Sam went off the rails, focused on creatures that were causing problems—killing folks or livestock, destroying property, that sort of thing. But his grandfather took the title of ‘hunter’ a bit more literally. He sought out the inhuman, tracked things that tried to hide. His entire life was dedicated to eliminating all the dangerous mythical beasts and magical beings—and to a hunter, they were all dangerous.

If what he suspected was true, and he’d interpreted Samuel’s leading comment to Castiel correctly, his grandad had been responsible for killing Castiel’s family when he was younger. It was the only reason he could think of for Samuel to have seen a less grown-up Castiel, and for Castiel to have been so unnerved at just the sight of him. That was one of the things he desperately wanted Castiel’s confirmation on, but none came.

The other big issue he had was with the claim that the attempted electrocution and successful stabbing had been necessary because Castiel tried to escape. It would explain why Castiel had clamped down on the bond, to stop Dean from finding out, but… Dean had felt the chains still tight and heavy around Castiel’s body the entire time they suffered together. They hadn’t moved or loosened at all; even if Castiel had tried to break free, there was no way he’d been enough of a threat to justify hurting him like that.

Especially since Samuel had to know what it would do to Dean.

The more he thought about it, the less he liked the whole situation. When everything had gone to shit, he’d blamed Castiel. He still didn’t know what had caused the going to shit itself, but he was more convinced than ever that if Castiel had been responsible, it hadn’t been on purpose. Knowing even what little he’d come to know about Castiel, he didn’t believe for a second that he ever would have wanted to tie himself to a hunter. Even subjugation seemed preferable. Even death.

**I’m glad you finally understand.**

Dean startled so violently that he fell off his enchanted bucket. Some asshole or another had left it for him while he was passed out the first night. He would’ve suspected Gordon for the sheer dickishness of it, but the man didn’t like touching magic items with three pairs of gloves on, so a glorified, self-emptying bedpan was probably out of the question. Bobby was a much more likely culprit, especially since it had come with a note saying, ‘It ain’t the sink.’

“Son of a bitch!” He righted himself and his bucket, glad its charm meant nothing had spilled, and waited a beat to make sure no one had been summoned by his racket before crossing his arms and glaring, though he didn’t have anything particularly relevant to glare at.

_That’s it? That’s what you were waiting for, me to have a shit-bucket epiphany?_

**It’s not my fault if your brain only works when you’re relieving yourself,** Castiel thought back wryly.

Dean wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was as glad that Castiel was being a smug little shit as he was to hear from him again. It meant, he was pretty sure, that Castiel was okay. That they were okay, in whatever bond they’d formed, and Castiel didn’t hate him for the things he’d thought or the things his grandfather had done. He wouldn’t have blamed Castiel for it, after all that, but he’d made his decision and he meant it.

He and Castiel were going to cooperate. They might even get along, if they could put aside the bullshit enough to try.

Of course, he didn’t have to admit it for Castiel to know.

**I try to limit myself to one genocidal maniac plotting my death at a time. I couldn’t be sure which side you’d land on until you were sure, which was a conclusion you wanted to reach without my ‘interference.’**

Dean winced at the obvious, displeased emphasis on the last word, but it was fair. He’d second-guessed his decision to treat Castiel like a person as soon as he’d had the chance, and Castiel must’ve had a front row seat to most, if not all, of his angry and unjustified thoughts. With everything on his mind, he hadn’t bothered working on shielding anything from their bond. Maybe he should’ve been, with all his worry over Castiel’s influence, but— _Well, too late now._

**While it may have been unwise on your part, I appreciated the insight. Having been a witness to the process, even if it wasn’t entirely willingly, means I can have faith in the result.**

_That’s great, but…_ Dean considered the best way to phrase his thoughts, then realized that was pointless. _You know this all would’ve been a buttload less dramatic and difficult if I could say the same for you, right? I’ve been in the dark about your intentions this whole time, except when you were mad enough to let things slip._

 _I get it,_ he added before Castiel could form the protest Dean felt building in him. _I’m not saying I don’t. You said from the start that I had the upper hand here, and even if it didn’t go exactly to plan, that’s still pretty much true. These guys might not be thrilled with me, but they’re still my people. Not even counting my, uh, genocidal maniac of a grandad._

Castiel didn’t apologize for the insult. Dean didn’t expect him to; didn’t want him to, really. So he moved on, because there was nothing else to say about the truth.

_But now that we’ve established I’m not gonna fuck you over, you know. Maybe while I work on shutting stuff down a bit, you could… I dunno, open it up a bit? It may not seem like much, but I’m putting everything on the line trusting you, buddy. It kinda—_

It wasn’t something he would ever allow himself to say, but his thoughts were a lot harder to stop than his words. They continued without his conscious permission, — _sucks to feel alone in this._

It obviously reached Castiel, because Dean felt the change immediately. Softer than the runaway anger or intentional pushes of emotion Dean had received from him before, Castiel’s mind unshuttered gradually. He was a cool mist settling around Dean, a roll of thunder in the distance that sounded soothing for once instead of threatening. The storm it heralded felt familiar. Protective, not destructive.

_Castiel._

**Hello, Dean.**

\ \ \

When Dean woke up the next morning, he found his hand curled around the blood-and-sand crystal beneath his pillow. He hadn’t seen it, hadn’t even thought about it, since getting vicariously zapped with the cattle prod. It must have fallen into the bed when he dropped it, and been lurking there for a few days. Wasn’t like he changed his sheets that often to begin with, and since he didn’t have access to laundry other than rubbing his clothes down with a quickly fading soapstone, if it didn’t poke at him during the night, he wasn’t going to notice it.

Apparently it had finally made its way into being an annoyance, though. He didn’t remember waking up enough to grab it, and was actually kind of surprised he hadn’t kicked it under the bed instead.

The glass was smooth as butter under his thumb, warm from being held for however long he’d been clutching it in his sleep. He decided he might as well leave it there; at least it was less obtrusive than making a lump in his pocket. For whatever reason, he still wasn’t ready to share it with Bobby.

\ \ \

Dean and Castiel talked a lot more after that. Actually talked, not just sniped back and forth at one another. It was nice, especially since they didn’t get much else in the way of company. In fact, as far as Dean could tell, Castiel didn’t get any visitors at all. Not even another appearance from Samuel to be creepy or shitty, though Dean got the impression from Bobby that the old man was itching to see how his captive elemental would react to his sizeable arsenal of hunting relics and weapons. The only thing stopping him and his apparent new favorite protege Gordon from following through wasn’t Dean’s exposure, but John’s wrath.

It was nice to know his dad still gave enough of a shit about him to have bitched Samuel out for his last stunt, since Dean hadn’t seen him once in the days he’d been confined to his room.

But he still got to see Bobby twice a day, most days; though sometimes he was too grumpy to do much more than bring Dean food and tell him they still had no idea what was going on with the bond, they hadn’t found Sam, everything was still awful. When it wasn’t Bobby with his food, it was Gordon or one of the silent, judgmental Campbell cousins. At least it was contact, more than Castiel had.

 _Shit,_ Dean realized, _are they even feeding you?_

**Not intentionally. But I can survive without for a long time, and the shock from your grandfather helped, actually. It’s even better energy for me than food.**

Castiel’s amusement came with a bitter edge, but so freely given that Dean couldn’t help sharing in it. It really did help, having Cas reciprocate the bond more completely. He felt so much less exposed; more content than he ever would’ve believed, if he’d been able to predict ending up in this situation.

But there was another way to limit his exposure, one that would help Castiel in return. He didn’t complain again about Dean’s constantly broadcast thoughts, but Dean figured it couldn’t be fun for him to be barraged by Dean’s stream of consciousness. Even if it wasn’t as terrible a time as they had experienced when they first connected, now that their thoughts weren’t limited to fear and anger and suspicion, it wasn’t fair to inflict that on Castiel.

So Dean practiced his discipline, control, whatever—he spent a lot of time thinking about walls and jars and all sorts of other crap Castiel guided him through. Except it wasn’t crap, because within another day or two he found himself able to control what passed through the link to Castiel and what didn’t, at least for the most part. He didn’t try to hide, though; not after they’d both grown used to sharing their thoughts so intimately.

Castiel pushed him to take it further. **We have a unique opportunity to practice defending ourselves. Shield your thoughts and I’ll try to break through. Then we’ll try the other way.**

 _Look, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. But can I get, like, a minute to bask in my accomplishment here?_ Dean complained.

The warmth of Castiel’s pride was almost enough to convince him it was worth jumping right into it, but then Bobby came by for another round of ‘We ain’t learned shit, you got anything new to tell me?’ and the moment passed.

\ \ \

Castiel’s wings continued to be a source of pain for him, and Dean still couldn’t feel it. But he could tell something was hurting Castiel, and since he wasn’t getting the echo of it, it had to be the wings.

 **They aren’t healing,** Castiel told him one night when he stretched out on his bed, sleepless and thoughtful.

He could feel the tendrils of worry threaded around Castiel’s chest, the emotion as dark and skeletal as the wings themselves. He wasn’t sure if Castiel was sending it to him on purpose or too overwhelmed by the feeling to stop it, but whatever the cause, he tried to offer back some sympathy and comfort. It probably didn’t work; he was worried, too.

_Let me see?_

Castiel couldn’t turn his head very far, so all Dean saw when he pushed the thought through was the drooping tip of his right wing, charred feathers and bone dragging beneath the weight of the heavy chains still wrapped tight around them. With the raw and burned wounds scraped raw by every shift of the rough metal, Dean didn’t know how Castiel wasn’t out of his head with the pain. It looked awful. Part of him almost wished he could feel it, just to have some idea of how terrible it had to be for Castiel.

 **No,** Castiel interrupted his thoughts sharply. **I wouldn’t want you to have to endure that.**

It was such a far cry from their first interactions, the threats and hatred that had raged between their minds. Dean felt a flutter of warmth at that realization, and double checked his mental shielding to make sure it didn’t slip through. He knew he was mostly to blame for all the shit that had happened, so he wasn’t sure he had the right to be happy about things going better.

But he was. He understood so much more since talking to Castiel; not just about him and other elementals, but about the world in general. His view of it, the view he’d learned from his father and his grandfather and all the damaged people he’d grown up around, was flawed. Because it couldn’t just be elementals they were wrong about. How many innocent creatures had they killed—had Dean himself killed—just for the crime of being non-human? It hurt to think about, but he knew he had to.

He’d spend the rest of his life atoning. Trying to help all those whose kind he’d hunted before. He almost didn’t know where to start—but he did. There was one thing he could do before anything else, even before worrying about saving Sam and by extension the rest of the world. He could help Castiel.

Asking Gordon was a gamble. He didn’t know Dean as well as Bobby did, and so wouldn’t be able to call him out for lying the way Bobby could and would. But he also wasn’t as invested in Dean’s welfare, and was definitely less sympathetic to his situation. He tried anyway, because he didn’t want Castiel to keep suffering and Gordon was the one who brought him breakfast that morning.

“Hey, Gordon,” he said before the man could leave, as he was obviously in a hurry to do. “You been up to the Campbell compound lately?”

Gordon stopped, eyeing him warily. “Yeah. Why?”

“There’s something up with the thing’s wings.” He had to hide his desire to wince at what he was saying, how he had to keep on acting like he thought Castiel was a thing. A creature to be abused or controlled. It was hard to be reminded of how callous he’d been about Castiel’s life and freedom not that long ago.

 **You know better now,** Castiel reassured him. How messed up was it that the comfort was going in that direction, not the other way around? Whatever Castiel said, Dean had a lot to answer for.

So he pushed on, despite his discomfort (and what was that compared to Castiel’s, anyway?). “I dunno if it’s the way it got fried or the chains or what, but it’s hurting like shit and I can feel it, man. Any way you or my grandad can take a look at those, maybe unchain the wings?”

He expected Gordon to be dismissive at best, derisive at worst; he hoped for something better, of course, but that was what he expected. What he got instead was a sharpening of interest, so sudden and keen that it made his skin ripple like a shiver—not a cold shiver, but the kind he got in the heat, when all the sweat on his body seemed to evaporate at once. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

“You can feel its wings?” Gordon asked. He closed in on Dean, further into his space than Dean felt comfortable with, and narrowed his eyes. He scrutinized Dean’s face, then tried to circle around to Dean’s back and Dean had to raise his hands and shove Gordon back.

Cutting off Gordon’s protest, he said, “Back off, dude. I’m not a fucking experiment. I just want my life back, okay? And this constant pain is a great place to start.”

Gordon sneered. “I would’ve thought figuring out what kind of freaky magic the elemental got you with would be the place you’d wanna start. You know, so we can break the connection and skewer it like you should’ve done in the first place.”

It was a lost cause. He’d only riled Gordon up and, from the way Gordon eyed him on his way out, given him even more reason to be suspicious of Dean’s motives. He didn’t think that was fair—even if, in this case, Gordon was actually right and Dean had something entirely different than what he’d said in mind.

 _Just because I’m lying to him, it doesn’t mean he has any right to think I’m lying to him,_ he thought, despite knowing how childish it sounded.

**Did you know that humans have the most infuriatingly inconsistent sense of morality of any sentient creature I’ve ever met?**

Dean snorted, amused more than offended, but he still shot back, _You were a desert hermit, who did you even meet?_

A chuckle breezed over him from Castiel’s mind, then the command: **A solid glass sphere, encircling you. Large enough to go through the walls of your room, but it doesn’t hit them or shatter. It passes through; solid through solid.**

Even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant, Dean flopped back against the pillows, closed his eyes, and pictured it. He kept running into the place where the sphere met the wall and losing his mental image, because really, what did that even look like? But Castiel told him not to worry about the physical details of it so much. That was the trick, he insisted: **Stop conflating the physical with the metaphysical. They don’t act the same.**

‘The metaphysical’ doesn’t act like shit, isn’t that what makes it metaphysical? Ain’t real.

Castiel’s sigh was almost tangible enough to stir the stale air in his room—or was that another conflation of the physical and metaphysical?

 **You’re impossible,** Castiel complained without a hint of actual irritation. **Fine, we’ll do it your way. Strictly physical.**

Unexpectedly, Dean’s thoughts veered in a very, very different direction. Memories of the last time that phrase had been used; skin and sweat and movement. As if that weren’t bad enough, the other body morphed without his effort or desire into Castiel, his chest bare and not marked with the black wards, his wings full and spread, his legs—

Dean managed to shut it down. He knew what Castiel meant and it definitely wasn’t that, he didn’t even know where that image had come from. But from the hitch in his connection with Castiel, he wasn’t fast enough to stop the visual from crossing the hundreds of miles between them. With the bond, there might as well have been no distance.

 _Sorry,_ he thought before Castiel could react beyond pointed silence. _Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. I didn’t mean for you to see it—fuck, I didn’t mean to see it, I’m not trying to…_

He didn’t know how to finish that, so he didn’t try. Castiel would get what he meant, even though he’d shielded his mind more than was usual for them lately. He’d been caught by surprise by that line of thought, hadn’t known he would need to stop his subconscious from flowing through to Castiel, and he took a moment to regret feelings so comfortable with Castiel that he’d let that happen.

But only a moment, because on the whole he preferred that ease to having to keep his guard up all the time. That was, he reasoned, probably why Castiel had appeared in that scene to begin with. Castiel just had a—a place now, in his head; Dean spent so much time thinking with and to and about him, he wasn’t used to having things that were separate. His brain was just trying to fit the pieces together.

 _And it’s just, uh, it’s been a while,_ he added. _I dunno about you guys, but we human males have… Ugh, I sound like an afterschool special on puberty. Can we pretend this never happened, or have I creeped you out too much?_

To his great relief, Castiel sounded and felt sincere when he answered, **Of course, Dean. I’m not ‘creeped out’ or offended. We’ve been put in a situation that’s very intimate by many definitions of the word; it’s not so strange that it might be confused with other forms of intimacy.**

He also sounded a little melancholy, sad in a distant and lonely way, that had Dean asking before he could stop himself, _Did you have… I mean, Bobby said elementals sometimes have mates, like—that word’s usually used for permanent things, you know? Not that Bobby’s actually an expert, obviously, I think we’ve established that we don’t really know shit about you guys, but I just mean…_

He let the thought trail off because his awkward rambling seemed to have achieved his goal: Castiel felt amused, warm.

**We’re not so different from what I’ve observed of humans. Each group of us has different cultures and traditions. Lake elementals’ courtship rituals don’t much resemble lava elementals’, though there are some similarities to river elementals. But like you, we’re just looking for someone to share our lives. Procreation is a bonus, but not always the goal. A cloud elemental and a mountain elemental would be an infertile couple, but it’s been known to happen.**

**Perhaps,** he thought with a mist of the bitter sorrow floating back in, **that’s part of the reason why there are so few of us left.**

The feeling bled over to Dean. Not through the link—he and Castiel were much more careful about affecting each other’s emotions, now—but by way of his own guilt and sympathy. Because he knew what Castiel wasn’t cruel or vengeful enough to say, which was that even if true, that was a very small part of the reason. Humans were to blame. Mages who enslaved them in gems; witches who carved them apart for power; hunters like Dean, and apparently particularly hunters like Dean’s grandfather, who murdered them for less reason than that.

Castiel was the last of his kind. Even if he were free and able to go find himself a nice lady wind elemental or something, there would be no more lightning elementals after him. He had no idea how Castiel handled that fact, since Dean couldn’t process it and it wasn’t even his reality.

**It will be, if your brother’s demon lover has her way.**

Dean winced instinctively away from the reminder, though Castiel didn’t mean it viciously like he had when he first threw his knowledge of the situation at Dean. It was just the truth: Ruby wanted to all but wipe humanity from the Earth, and she had gathered enough support—covens of witches, the lesser demons they summoned on her behalf, her control over Sam’s substantial power—that she actually had a chance at succeeding. Thus Dean seeking out an elemental’s help in the first place and leading them into the whole mess.

It had been looming over them the whole time, even as they focused on getting that mess under control. What he didn’t understand was why Castiel chose that moment to bring it up, except maybe that he really didn’t want to keep going with the other topic.

**If you don’t know that demons have innate telepathic abilities, you know even less about them than you do about us. That’s why I’ve been pushing this: if we can learn to block each other, it may help to keep the demons we encounter at bay when they try to invade our minds.**

_We’re not gonna encounter any demons where we’re at,_ Dean pointed out with a scowl at his chained leg that Castiel couldn’t see. _Or if we do, it means the world’s fucked enough that resisting demon mind games is gonna be the least of our worries._

**Do you plan to allow yourself to be locked in your room until then? I thought perhaps you still wanted to save your brother.**

_No shit I do. But we’re kind of short on options for getting out, unless you’ve got some brilliant plan you wanna share. I’m still too much of an unknown risk and you’re, you know, you. And Samuel is Samuel. Gordon’s already suspicious, if I start trying to talk my way out, or talk them into letting you out, without any progress? Maybe I just get written off as a bad deal. Best case scenario they use us for guinea pigs, worst case they get it over with and kill us._

_Or maybe it’s the other way around._ He didn’t much like the idea of being at the mercy of the man he was learning his grandfather was. And if his dad gave up on him like he’d given up on Sammy, he didn’t suspect there’d be much actual mercy to it.

**No plan; not yet. But when we have one, we should be as prepared as possible.**

_All right. So what did you have in mind? Strictly physically, of course,_ he added, because while the mortification had faded the memory hadn’t, so turning it into a joke seemed like the safest option. Not joking about it meant taking it seriously and that, Dean thought very carefully only to himself, wasn’t something he could handle on top of everything else. He sure wasn’t going to make Castiel deal with having mental images like that forced on him when he was already chained to a wall.

**As a hunter, you’ve been trained to fight.**

It wasn’t a question, but Dean sent an affirmation in the pause that followed.

**I imagine that includes defensive tactics. If someone tries to punch you, you try to stop them, yes?**

_Yeah, Castiel. You generally try not to get punched._ He rolled his eyes, but since Castiel was trying to be helpful, he figured he might as well do the same. He passed along flashes of dodging, blocking, keeping up a guarded stance.

Castiel’s approval burst like a struck match, brief but warm. **Yes, just so. We’ve learned to keep our guard up, for the most part. Now we have to dodge and block.**

Dean snorted. _Why couldn’t you have said that in the first place? What the fuck does that even have to do with glass spheres and walls and all that crap?_

 **Don’t worry,** Castiel thought dryly. **I should have known it was too complex a concept for you to grasp. We’ll stay away from the metaphors from now on and stick to hitting things. You’re reasonably good at that.**

There was enough friendly fondness carried over that Dean didn’t really feel offended, but he had to protest for appearance’s sake, _First of all, yes, thank you. I’m great at that. Second, don’t go blaming me just because you don’t make any sense. You can admit you were wrong, it’s okay._

Castiel responded with a mental flick that startled Dean in more ways than one.

_What was that?_

**Trying something.** Castiel sounded far too happy with himself, especially when he asked, **Did it hurt?**

 _No. And also thanks for the fucking warning, jackass. It was… weird. Like, you ever have those dreams where—_ He stopped, suddenly realizing he wasn’t sure. _Do you dream? I mean, I know you sleep, but you’re always awake before I am._

_But yeah, it was like one of those falling dreams that wakes you up. Disorienting._

**I dream,** Castiel answered. His tone was gently pleased, as had become usual for Dean’s questions; no more defensiveness or derisiveness. He liked telling Dean about himself, seemed to like that Dean cared enough to ask. **And I know the feeling you mean. I’ve had similar dreams, where my wings would seize up for no reason and I’d plummet uncontrollably. They’ve become much more frequent of late.**

That made an awful kind of sense. Dean probably could’ve guessed it, if he’d thought about Castiel and dreams before. With Castiel’s wings damaged beyond function or healing, of course he would have nightmares about it. He wished again he could do something to help, but the only thing that had ever worked with Sammy’s bad nights was spending them in Dean’s room. At least until he’d grown out of them, or grown too old to want to cuddle his big brother for comfort. Realizing he didn’t actually know which one it was left Dean feeling like shit; had that been why Sam had turned to a demon?

Cuddling Castiel was out of the question for so many reasons, so all Dean had to offer was, _I’m sorry, that sucks._

 **It’s not our worst problem,** Castiel deferred. **Which is why we need to focus.**

_Right._

The first time Dean picked a number and tried to keep it from Castiel, it took all of three seconds to feel that same flick as before, followed by a triumphant, **Three.** The next try, he pictured defending like Castiel had suggested: a physical block, striking out to intercept the hit before it could reach into his mind. He felt something different, but his timing wasn’t quite right, and Castiel threw his number back at him— **Three again, is it too difficult come up with a new number?** —before he’d even recovered from the assault.

But with practice, after days of headaches, he started to get it. Castiel had to try harder, make multiple attempts to drag the information out of Dean. Finally, even though it left him shaking and dizzy on the bed, he held out for what felt like hours as Castiel pressed on harder and harder with no success. The attack fell away abruptly; at last it was Castiel who gave in, exhausted as he congratulated Dean’s accomplishment.

 _Thanks,_ Dean thought back once his head stopped spinning. _It was fucking three, by the way._

He took a moment to relax into Castiel’s muted laughter, then ordered, _Pick a number._

**You don’t want a day to rest on your laurels again?**

_Fuck no. It’s time for revenge, cupcake. But maybe after dinner._

\ \ \

Castiel was his friend—no matter how much he refused to admit it to Bobby’s increasingly skeptical looks and questions. Try as he might to hide it, it must’ve been pretty clear that Dean was happier and less full of hatred than he ought to have been after so long being confined. Since there hadn’t been any progress on bringing Sam home safe or on breaking Dean and ‘the lightning monster’ apart, there weren’t many options for what could be improving his mood.

“Just tell me it ain’t getting to you.” Bobby stared hard at him, refusing to hand over Dean’s dinner—a good looking burger that Dean really wanted to sink his teeth into—until he was satisfied with the answer.

Since he was as stubborn a bastard as Dean had ever known, “It ain’t” didn’t quite fit the bill. It was true, though. More or less. Castiel had gotten through to Dean, but that wasn’t the same as getting to him, not the way Bobby meant. It wasn’t a bad thing—Castiel wasn’t a bad thing, or a thing at all. Dean would take his influence over most of the hunters he knew any day.

For a brief moment, he wondered if that was what Sam told himself, too. It didn’t panic him the way it had last time he doubted Castiel, though. With the ever-growing strength of the bond between them, Dean could allow himself to trust without reservation. Castiel wouldn’t betray him, wouldn’t fuck with his head, wouldn’t ask him to do anything against his morals.

So it was easy to meet Bobby’s eyes and say, “I’m still me, Bobby. Ain’t nothing gonna change that. You ask me what the most important thing in the world is and I’m gonna tell you saving Sammy, every time. The second I get out of here, that’s what I’m doing.”

“And you think I oughta let you out.” Bobby didn’t look convinced, but he did hand over Dean’s meal.

Dean devoured a mouthful of juicy, cheesy, meaty goodness and shrugged with his swallow. “I don’t think anything I say’s gonna make that happen. Even if I change your mind, Dad and Grandpa ain’t gonna sign off on it.”

“Ah, crap.”

Taking another bite, Dean raised his eyebrows at Bobby’s sigh.

“You sound way too calm about that. Don’t tell me you’re hatching some dumbass escape plan.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

“You know.” Bobby sat beside him and slanted a look at Dean. “They’re talking about finding somewhere else for the elemental. Maybe you, too. Someplace further. The distance helped before, seems like, so they figure if we can get you separated far enough…”

“They figure? Or you figure?” The question came out rougher than it should’ve for pretending not to care, and they both knew it. Even Castiel could tell, but Dean ignored his silent warning and pushed on, trying to salvage something like plausible deniability. “You wanna drag me outta my home in chains, Bobby?”

“Oh fuck off, you know it ain’t my call.” Bobby looked uncomfortable as he left, though; Dean only wished he knew if that would work for them or against.

 **It might not be a bad idea,** Castiel pointed out once they were alone, but he didn’t sound any happier about it than Dean was. **If we’re no longer linked, they may let you go.**

The thought of losing his connection to Castiel made him sick all on its own. He’d hated it at the start, sure, but he’d come to appreciate the bond. He hadn’t realized how lonely he was until he didn’t have to be, and being alone with his thoughts again all the time seemed awful. There was a bigger problem, though.

_The second we’re not connected, you’re dead. You know that, man._

Castiel shared a wave of helplessness that Dean wished he didn’t understand so well. **If we can’t come up with another solution, it’s just a matter of time until we’re both dead anyway.**

 _Then we’ll come up with a better plan,_ Dean insisted. _And fuck you if you think I’m just gonna let you die like that._

A lot of conflicting thoughts spun in Castiel’s mind, but he didn’t share them enough for Dean to get anything more than that impression of indecision. In the end, he didn’t break their stalemated silence with any of them. All he said was, **Then you still owe me your revenge, I suppose. I’ll pick a number.**

Revenge was even sweeter than expected: with a little more practice, Dean learned to take it further than Castiel could. Shielding had come more naturally to Castiel, to the point that the progression of their exercise was essentially reversed when they switched roles. In the beginning, Dean couldn’t force his way through Castiel’s guard at all.

Castiel insisted that they keep trying, because Dean was close enough to success that Castiel had to fight him off. But instead of rebuffing Dean faster and easier each time, as they went on, Castiel found his mental assaults harder to resist. Despite a lifetime of feeling little affinity for magic, of being told he lacked the mental stamina for it; despite the weeks of feeling inferior to Castiel’s disciplined mind and easy control of their bond—Dean was the one who was able to push himself into Castiel’s mind when Castiel was trying to keep him out.

He didn’t mean to take it too far. Castiel didn’t deserve that, especially with all ways that Dean’s actions had already stolen his free will from him. Dean’s anger had, directly or indirectly, destroyed his wings, forced its way into his mind, blocked him from his element, and chained him painfully in a dark basement. The last thing Dean wanted to do was add to his crimes.

But he was still keyed up from their argument, pissed that Castiel thought he was capable of leaving his friend to die just to save himself. The hunter Castiel had first met? Yeah, that guy would’ve done it. He wasn’t that guy anymore, though, and he thought Castiel knew that. He thought they were close enough, had shared enough, that Castiel would know Dean wasn’t the kind of man to abandoned his friends like that.

It felt like the spiral of rage that once threatened to consume both of them, but this time Dean knew it was all his. He could tell the difference between what was his and wasn’t now, and besides they were both shielded: Castiel to hide his number as part of their game, and Dean to hide his hurt anger from Castiel because he wasn’t ready to share it.

By the time he shoved his way past Castiel’s guard—maybe more forcefully than was polite, but wasn’t that the point of the whole exercise?—all he could focus on was how little Castiel must think of him. So instead of hunting down the information he was meant to, he found himself pushing for something he had no right to. He went looking for the answer to what Castiel really thought about him.

When he found it, he felt like the shittiest human who ever lived.

**That’s a very high bar.**

Shutting out the dry humor of Castiel forgiving his invasion didn’t help. If anything, it made him feel worse. But he needed the time to sort himself out, and he couldn’t deal with the bond until he’d done that. Castiel didn’t fight him when he withdrew.

He’d been wrong, as always seemed to be the case where Castiel was involved. What he’d found in Castiel’s mind was, if anything, the opposite of the dislike and apathy he’d feared.

Intimate thoughts. Sexual, like Dean’s own flash of unexpected fantasy, but Castiel’s had been much more detailed even in the brief moment Dean had touched on them. And they hadn’t been unexplained for Castiel; he was quite certain of their source in his attraction to Dean. Whether or not the idea had been put into his head by Dean’s awkward brain, Castiel wanted Dean’s dick with surprising intensity, given all the other things he could want to improve his current life circumstances.

That wasn’t the only thing he wanted, which was probably why he felt so strongly about it. It was definitely why Dean needed a minute to gather his thoughts. Because it went deeper than the sex—which Dean wasn’t nearly as troubled by as he would’ve expected himself to be, honestly. Once he recovered from his knee-jerk denial, the moment of envisioning it had actually been pretty hot, and Castiel’s expansion on the concept… He could get into that, if they ever got the fuck away from their jailers and got the chance.

But softer and more pervasive were the thoughts of romance, of permanency. Castiel had grown attached to Dean despite their thunderous start, and Dean—Dean had to process that. He was attached, too. Obviously. He cared about Castiel, the kind of deep and unyielding protectiveness that came with family. But was there more to it than that?

He enjoyed Castiel’s company, such as it was. Though really, having Castiel in his head was closer company than sitting in a room with him; more intimate, as Castiel himself had called it. Having to share that kind of space with anyone else, even with Sam, who was his favorite person in the world, would’ve driven him out of his mind in under a week. He and Sam couldn’t even share a motel room for that long without descending into bickering, forget a psychic bond. But he wanted that with Castiel, to the point where he’d freaked out at the thought of losing it.

With the clarity of hindsight, he could even see why he’d been so hurt at the thought that Castiel didn’t trust him. It wasn’t like the guy didn’t have an objectively excusable reason not to trust him. After all, if he couldn’t figure out the extent of what he’d do for Castiel, how was Castiel supposed to know? Now he knew.

The truth was, he’d been falling for Castiel since he started seeing him as a person. Not human, because he wasn’t, but enough like a human to deserve a name, a sex (some sex, if Dean ever got his way), a friend.

 _Well, shit. I love you too,_ he thought even as he let the diamond glass of his barriers down. Castiel deserved to feel the full weight of his feelings, the truth of his statement. It flowed from him with an urgency that felt like bleeding out, for a moment—and he knew what that felt like, a few times over. Then it came rushing back, all he’d lost and more, as Castiel’s emotions washed over him. Freely given this time, and all the sweeter for it.

Their situation limited how content Dean could be with the revelation, though. _We’re so fucked._

**Were we not equally ‘fucked’ before?**

Castiel wasn’t exactly wrong; their circumstances hadn’t really changed. They’d already been imprisoned, already planning escape. But it felt so much more unfair with the knowledge that there was more than friendship passing through the bond between them. But Dean wasn’t willing to wait any longer now that everything they had to lose was out in the open. They’d been trapped long enough to hit their self-imposed deadline, more or less: control of their bond, readiness for demonic telepathy.

**We still need something more than determination.**

_I think I’ve got something, but it’ll need to wait until morning._

**There’s a high likelihood we’ll fail,** Castiel thought after Dean shared his plan. **If someone doesn’t react how you expect, or if we mistime our actions, we’re probably going to be killed.**

Optimistic fucker.

 **Realistic,** Castiel argued, but his tone was mild. He wasn’t trying to talk Dean out of it, because what other options did they have? He also wasn’t wrong.

Breaking out would tip Dean’s hand once and for all, and though he had an idea of who he could trust and who he couldn’t, there was no way of knowing for sure until the time came. His dad would never forgive him. His grandad would actively come after them. Bobby was more of a wildcard, but he’d still been a hunter for longer than Dean had been alive and that meant a lot of baggage.

Since there wasn’t anything to be gained by worrying about it—it was the only plan they had, and they were out of time for anything else—Dean kicked back on the bed and thought, _You know, it’s always been my sincere belief that no man should spend his last night on Earth celibate unless he really wants to._

Castiel accepted the change of topic for what it was with good grace. **An admirable ideology, and I wouldn’t say that I want to. But there are physical and logistical issues with implementing that plan that I would call nearly insurmountable.**

Refusing to be deterred by the feel of the chains that Castiel shrugged against, Dean unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open. _‘Nearly’ is a very important word there, buddy._

Dean slipped his hand beneath the hem of the thin, soft t-shirt he wore as an undershirt and scratched his fingernails gently across his own stomach. The catch of Castiel’s breath hitched in his own chest, confirmed that Castiel felt the touch, too.

**Oh.**

The wonder that spread through Castiel as he realized Dean’s plan made him preen. He had good ideas, every now and then. If they could feel everything else that happened to the other, why not this? Just like the mental side of their bond had brought them pain before they reshaped it into something they needed, the physical connection should be theirs; something they could claim and use for their needs, not just to be turned against them as a weapon.

 _Yeah. You like that?_ He trailed higher, stroking over his ribs and breastbone, light and teasing. _Wish I could touch you. Wanna feel your skin under my fingers, feel you tense up and shiver when I…_ Dean dragged his nails down his chest just hard enough to leave lines of pink fire.

Castiel couldn’t jerk far into the sensation, immobile as he was, but the bite of chains against his shoulders was drowned out by the whirlwind that hit Dean when Castiel lost control of his shields at the pleasure. It was all Dean could do to keep functioning with Castiel reeling in his mind, but he wasn’t about to block it in the slightest, even if it made his task harder. It was the only part of Castiel he could touch and he was greedy for it, pulling both his shirts off in one go so that he could chase the momentum, keep Castiel off balance with thumbs rubbing over his nipples.

 **Dean!** For all the voice was internal—fucking metaphysical—it shook with Castiel’s shuddering breaths.

 _Gonna do this to you,_ Dean promised, pinching and rolling the sensitive buds with one hand while the other petted down his stomach again. _Gonna get my hands all over you, feel it on my skin when my hands are on you. Fuck, baby, can you imagine what that’s gonna be like? Feeling everything I do to you, you feeling everything you do to me._

He stopped touching himself long enough to get his pants unbuttoned and shoved down. It also gave Castiel a second to recover, to come down just enough for Dean to check, _This is okay?_

All he got back was wordless, desperate lust, slamming into him so hard he was almost sure he’d just come on the spot. _Yeah,_ he thought. _Yeah, me too. I’m gonna make it so fucking nice for you, Castiel._

For all that he wasn’t totally hard yet, as he wrapped his hand around his dick and traced his other fingers all the way up to his chest to suck two into his mouth, he knew it wasn’t going to last long.

 _Can’t wait until that’s your dick,_ he told Castiel as he licked up the underside of his fingers and swirled his tongue at the tip. _Mostly because I just wanna suck your dick, but I gotta be honest—who hasn’t dreamed of sucking their own dick, right? When I blow you, it’ll be like I’m blowing myself, too. That’s gonna be awesome. I should probably sit down for that._

 _Or we could—fuck!_ He’d brought his wet fingers down to rub at the head of his dick, and saliva mixed with precum to slick down his jerking off, smooth the way a little so he could speed up.

_We could do it at the same time, you know, a sixty-nine kinda deal? Your dick in my mouth is like my dick in my mouth, but my dick is also in your mouth, which makes yours in—_

Electricity crackled to life under Dean’s skin as Castiel came, but not the pain of electrocution. It was energy, pleasure, rolled into a spark that flared across all his nerves at once. He felt more alive than he’d ever been, a live wire finding its ground and letting loose all the potential waiting in its current.

 _Castiel._ He bit his lip to hold the words inside. It was harder still to stop the moans that wanted to roll out of him with every shuddering breath as his hand started to stutter on his cock, finally and exhaustedly spent. _Cas, fuck, Cas._

 **Yes, Dean. I’m here, I’m with you. I’m…** He lost the words somewhere, instead pushing through formless thoughts of longing, skin-on-skin contact, eternity.

_Me too, sweetheart. Me too._

\ \ \

Part one of Dean’s plan wasn’t the riskiest, but it was the first place where things could go wrong.

**Obviously.**

_I’m pretty sure no one asked for your opinion, sunshine._

It was a half-hearted protest at best, even if Dean’s nerves did give it a snappish edge. Cas was in this just as much as Dean was, had as much to lose or more: at least some of the hunters would be hesitant to kill Dean unless absolutely necessary. Cas, conversely, was only alive on sufferance. Most, if not all, of the hunters they encountered would be itching for a chance to claim a lightning elemental as a hunting trophy.

That was why it was so important not to encounter any hunters during part three of the plan—but first they had to get through parts one and two.

Dean gave himself another washcloth bath in the sink the next morning. Getting on Bobby’s good side was bound to be easier while not smelling like a brothel. The man might love him, but Dean didn’t want to test the limits of that familial love against an all-night masturbatory adventure with his supernatural lover. He was already asking a lot.

“Hey, Bobby.”

He tried for a casual tone, but that never worked against Bobby. Crossing his arms and eyeing Dean up and down, Bobby asked, “What do you want?”

Dean didn’t deny it. “My phone. I’ve been a model prisoner, but I’m going outta my mind here. You’re not getting anywhere, time’s a-wasting, so let me do a little digging of my own.”

“Uh huh. Digging.”

**I don’t think he believes you, Dean.**

_’Course he doesn’t, I’m lying out my ass and he knows it. But he’s not mad about it, and that’s the key here. He wants to help us—well, wants to help me. Sorry, babe. He already called me on planning to escape, remember, and he ain’t done anything about it. I just need to give him enough of an excuse and he’ll look the other way._

“Yeah. Don’t gimme that look, I got connections! And it ain’t like I can do any harm from my cozy little cellblock, right?”

“You could do harm from a cozy little straightjacket,” Bobby scoffed. But all the same, he reached into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out the glossy rectangle of a cell phone. He held it out and Dean grabbed it, ecstatic at how well that had gone, but Bobby didn’t let go right away. Forcing Dean into uncomfortably prolonged eye contact, Bobby scrutinized him and then said, gruff enough that Dean knew he had to be covering something, “Be careful, boy.”

It was as close to Bobby’s blessing as he was ever going to get on this endeavor.

A rainbow of notifications greeted Dean when he unlocked the phone. He ignored them all to pull up the contact he needed.

Charlie answered before the first ring fell silent. “Winchester! What’s with not returning my texts, have you been trapped under a rock?”

“Hey, Red. Something like that. Listen, I need a favor. Big favor. Like, end of the world stuff.”

“It’s always end of the world stuff with you. What’s up?”

Charlie wasn’t a hunter. Hunters weren’t entirely fond of her, in fact, and the feeling was mutual because Charlie had a fairy for a lover and that didn’t sit well with a lot of folks. Dean hadn’t understood it himself, the last time he’d hung out with her; he liked her, but Gilda living with her like a human partner weirded him out like nobody’s business. Before the two of them, he’d only ever seen fairies in miniature, sparkles contained in spelled cages and trinkets.

But Charlie was a resourceful and helpful enough witch that the hunters let her and Gilda be, wrote it off as eccentricity and didn’t bother her except when they were looking for help.

Cas had some particular opinions about the hypocrisy of that, and Dean couldn’t even argue. It had always bothered him, too, but before he’d been more sympathetic to the other side of it: to Gordon thinking they should just kill the fairy and then Charlie would be free from the enchantment she was obviously under. But no one else was willing to risk losing her as a contact by killing her love interest, even if it was a fairy creature, so Gordon behaved.

Now, he understood her point of view a lot better. He knew better than anyone by that point that loving a magical being didn’t mean being under some creepy thrall—but then there was Sam. Sam who absolutely was under a demon’s creepy thrall, to the point where he was trying to murder and enslave humanity for her sake.

Cas was conspicuously silent at that thought. Dean scowled. _We’d deserve it, is that what you’re saying?_

**I’m not saying anything. And I don’t want demons in charge any more than you do. But you’ll forgive me if I don’t immediately jump in with how sorry I am for your kind’s theoretical persecution.**

Which was fair, given Cas’s actual persecution and Dean’s part in it. Even if Cas didn’t blame him for it anymore.

When he explained what he needed (a way to get him out of the bunker and to the Campbell compound, because bringing the lightning elemental love of his life to the bunker was too fraught with danger, and a way to break the wards on his magic), Charlie didn’t even give him too hard a time over it. In fact, she was pretty sympathetic to the whole situation—which made sense, Dean supposed. She’d spent years dealing with hunters who considered her relationship a step above bestiality, and not a large step, either. He’d been one of them.

“But you’ve got it worse, I’ll give you that. They were never my people, you know?”

He couldn’t handle her sympathy on top of his guilt, so he pretended she hadn’t said anything. “So you’ll help?”

“Yeah, dude. Of course we will. Gimme, hm, three hours. Banshee?”

“Three banshees.” _Too much?_

**Maybe a little.**

“Two banshees. Maybe a minor haunting on the way back to Michigan?”

“You got it.”

 **And now?** Cas asked after he’d disconnected.

_Now we wait for Gilda to give us our distraction._

They weren’t waiting long. Bobby returned less than three hours later, loaded up with his spell pouches and a scowl. “We got two banshees acting up in Iowa, don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

“Sure do.” Dean grinned. “I know you should bring a shitton of hematite and as much gold dust as your cheap ass can bear to part with.”

Though he shook his head despairingly, Bobby’s unhappy grimace looked a little too fake. He let himself out without further questioning, but stopped to make an uncharacteristic point of telling Dean, “Since there’s two of ’em, we’re set to meet the Campbells out there. Figure all of us together, we oughta get the job done quick.”

Since he hadn’t exactly been subtle about it in the first place, Bobby’s emphasis on ‘all of us’ gave away his game entirely. Dean’s chest felt lighter than it had in days.

‘Clear in fifteen,’ he texted Charlie as soon as Bobby was gone.

In seconds, she replied, ‘Standing by.’

Dean dug the branching crystal out from under his pillow. His fingers knew the best places to curl around it, settling it into his palm with the comfort of habit. Branches extended past the edges of his hand; it was too large to be contained in his grip, but it felt like it belonged there.

_The way I hear it, some birds find pretty rocks to bring a potential mate to woo them._

**I’m not a bird, Dean. And I assure you, I had no intention of courting you at the time.**

_Yeah._ Grinning, Dean tossed the blood-glass in the air and admired the sparkle until he caught it again. _You wanted to kill me so bad._

A knock interrupted them, then Charlie poked her head in without waiting for a response. “Yo.”

He sat up and pocketed the crystal. “That was quick.”

“You know I got skills.” Her smirk flickered into a puzzled look. “Plus, your mage left the door unlocked for me.”

 **You underestimated him,** Cas thought in the wake of Dean’s shock.

 _Yeah, I guess so._ He owed Bobby a whole lot of good bourbon, once everything was over with.

“All right,” Charlie said, plopping down on the bed next to Dean with her legs crossed. She patted her lap. “Gimme your ankle.”

As she fiddled with the shackle, turning it this way and that, dusting it with a sprinkle of spicy-smelling pink powder, she asked, “So it worked?”

“Seems like it. As long as Gilda can keep up the light show until I get there. She’s—she’s safe, right? You know they’re not gonna be happy if they catch a fairy fucking around with fake monsters and leading them on a wild goose chase.”

Charlie paused in her work to rest a hand on Dean’s leg above the metal, looking him in the eye. “Here’s the thing about Gilda: she’s a total badass. Not only can she take care of herself, but she’ll have your hunters so convinced they’ve got an actual banshee on their hands that they’re going to come back here trading stories about exactly how pitchy her voice was.”

Her confidence reassured him, but he still had to say, “You guys are taking a huge risk for me. For us.”

“Nah.” With a flourish, Charlie flicked the lock mechanism and a red spark flared deep inside before the shackle fell open. “I mean, I’m happy to help, but I’m totally just doing it so I can raid the library while this place is undefended. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to get my hands on some of this stuff.”

Dean fought back the wave of guilt. The centuries of knowledge in that archive were his heritage, passed down generations on his dad’s side and only shared with trusted allies. But Charlie wasn’t going to do anything bad with it; maybe there was stuff in there that could help people like them, like Gilda and Cas. Better in her hands than with his hunters, at least until he could make them understand that not all supernatural beings were dangerous monsters.

Jumping off the bed, he took a circuit of the room to grab anything useful they’d left with him and enjoy his regained freedom. But he didn’t dally long; they didn’t have time.

He put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder to make sure, one last time, “You’ll be careful?”

“We’ll be fine. Go get your man.”

He returned her bone-crushing hug and let her shoo him out the door with a few more words of warning. Then he was on his own. Well, not quite on his own. Never again quite on his own, not with Cas. Who was still in need of a dramatic— **I think the less drama the better, really** —rescue. So Dean grabbed the first keys he found in the garage, found the car that matched them, and booked it for the acceleration points that would get him to Lansing.

He worried about two things, as he sped across stretches of highway and through acceleration points toward Cas.

He worried that he would be too slow. He was hitting all the charmed tunnels he could, but it was still a long trip and he cursed the need to drive at all, instead of being transported instantly. But that kind of power would take a couple dozen sorcerers and probably a soothsayer to boot, which were resources he didn’t have. So it was going to take time, and there were people much closer than he was to Cas who wanted to hurt him, who might if they found out that Dean was AWOL before he got there. He’d know, if they did anything, but he wouldn’t be able to stop it.

He also worried about the connection, that it would overwhelm him again as he got close. Even if his control was better, Bobby had said and Dean himself had noticed that the distance made their link less intense. What if all his work hadn’t been enough, and he lost himself still miles away from Cas? What if he lost himself as soon as he finally got to touch him?

**We won’t. We can retain ourselves, and if anything bleeds over it will be united, not fighting like we were before.**

_Gee, Cas, you seem awfully sure about the mechanics of something no one else in the history of the world has ever gone through,_ he grumbled back, though he was glad for the distraction of the meaningless bickering.

**Would you ever hurt me?**

_No! Of course not. Not ever again._

**And I wouldn’t hurt you. So how could our minds hurt each other, hurt ourselves? We won’t.**

Taking one hand off the wheel wasn’t recommended at the speeds Dean was going, but he did it anyway, resting it against the bulge that their crystal made in his pocket. He had to believe Cas was right, because there were no alternatives. Either he’d get to Cas and they’d be fine, or—or they were dead anyway, so he might as well try.

He made sure to keep checking in as he got closer, testing out the feel of the bond. Nothing changed, but Cas humored him and reported, each time, that he didn’t hear anything going on in the compound.

**As far as I know, they’re still on the hunt. Not that they told me where they were going, of course, but I could hear at least one car leaving.**

From Cas’s description, Dean was able to identify which cell he was being held in; he’d brought a few creatures to the compound himself, ones they could subdue but couldn’t figure out how to kill. He’d always thought Samuel just did more research until he found the answer, but now he suspected it was a lot worse than that. Some of those he’d brought in to be tortured to death were monsters, sure, violent and murderous; but some hadn’t been, and he was sure they hadn’t been blessed with a less terrible fate.

_Feel shitty later, Winchester. Save the one you can now._

It helped him follow through on that plan that none of the other doors in the corridor were closed. The cells were all empty, except for Cas’s. The keys that should’ve been hanging by that door were nowhere to be seen, but Bobby hadn’t been lying about Dean’s skill with picking mechanical locks: he got himself into the cell with no trouble at all, and then he was there, with Cas.

He was himself, and Cas was himself, and their respective walls held back everything they wanted held back—which didn’t include their relief, the strength of their feelings. They were together, and their combined joy at that was a balloon in Dean’s chest, light and swelling. He could touch Cas and kiss him and blow him, all of which he planned to do later when their lives and the future of the world weren’t quite so on the line. Well, the touching and kissing didn’t have to wait. Couldn’t wait.

His hands skimmed more exposed skin than they needed to as he worked to free Cas. Each touch built on the hum of static between them, need and want mixed with worry and reassurance and belonging. Though he had to be careful unwrapping the chains from around Cas’s mangled wings, he didn’t even hear them clang to the ground. His mind was too full of raging winds and cracking thunder, the taste of ozone as his mouth met Cas’s.

 **We should hurry, Dean,** Cas reminded him, but wasn’t any quicker to pull away than Dean was.

 _When we’re safe,_ Dean thought, resting his forehead against Cas’s to catch his breath. But he couldn’t finish the statement, because there were just too many things. Things he wanted to do, things they needed to talk about.

 **Yes.** Cas understood; of course he did.

He found it interesting that, despite finally being together in person, they both defaulted to their inner voices rather than regular speech. Strange, maybe, but he liked it. It felt appropriate for what they’d been through, and for the intimacy they shared.

Though Cas was physically free, the magical bindings had to wait until they got to Charlie’s house. Dean hated that he wasn’t enough, that he couldn’t do that for Cas himself. He hated how Cas’s wings were hurting him, too, but there was nothing to be done for that yet either. Cas was unsteady on his feet, but they made it out to the hallway together.

Just past the first corner, Gordon and Samuel waited for them.

“Such a disappointment, Dean,” his grandfather sighed. “Your brother was always soft. Takes after your dad’s line, magic and fancy. But you? Well, I thought Gordon had to be lying. There’s no way, I thought.”

Samuel had a gun drawn on Dean; Gordon’s was still holstered at his side. Instead, he wielded a machete—his favorite weapon and perfect for turning Cas into a lightning rod. Cas straightened from using Dean as a crutch and stepped in front of him instead, as if that would do either of them any good.

**At least I heal.**

_I do too now, thanks to you. Actually…_ That gave him an idea. It was a long shot, the longest he’d ever tried—more of a risk than tracking down one of the most powerful elementals and almost begging it for help, to be sure. But once again, it was all he had. _Buy me time._

He tucked his hand into his pocket behind the cover of Cas’s body and found what he was looking for: the branching tree of blood and glass. Him and Cas, his blood and Cas’s magic, fused together. It was the only thing that had been different between the subjugation Dean had tried and all the others he’d ever done and witnessed.

If they’d unintentionally formed some kind of bond in creating it, wouldn’t that explain everything? Well, not everything, but then trying to force a subjugation on top of it…

**Oh. You think so?**

_Makes sense. And it means it is your fault, after all._

Cas sent him a little jolt of exasperation, a passing thought of, **You’re the one who decided to bleed all over the place first.** But he focused on the two men trying to kill them and warned, voice as rumbling and dangerous as the first time Dean had heard it even though he was far from whole and in his own territory as he had been then, “Let us pass. We don’t want to hurt you.”

Snarling, Gordon pointed his machete at Cas and said, “You’re not in a position to make demands. You’re a monster with no claws or fangs left, and we’re gonna put you down like Dean shoulda done at the start. Just too bad he let himself get mixed up with you, since it means he’s going down too.”

Fingers twined with the branches of the glass, Dean thought about storms and rolling thunder. He focused on the sharp tang of ozone, the prickle of static on the back of his neck. He thought about the rush of voltage surging through him when he got Cas off, pure and brilliant. Slipping his hand out of his pocket, the glass still in his grasp, he reached for Cas. Their hands closed together around the crystal and Dean thought of lightning.

Chaos crashed around them; lightning and thunder all around, shattering through the windows, taking out the lights in bursts of sparks and exploding glass. When the lightning faded and the clouds dissipated back to daylight, Gordon and Samuel were on the floor.

Dean felt a surge of panic almost as jolting as the electricity, but a quick check assured him they were still alive. He—they—hadn’t killed his grandfather and a man who had once been his friend.

**Even if they deserved it.**

They didn’t have time for that argument, and Cas was only halfway serious. He wouldn’t expect Dean to kill his own family; he’d lost too much in that regard to wish it on anyone else.

Before they got more than a couple doors closer to Dean’s car, Cas froze. Dean knew why; he felt the tingling along his own neck and chest where black bands marked Cas’s binding wards. They glowed and then vanished as he watched, and Cas’s mangled wings flared out to either side, crackling briefly with electricity. His power was his own again, unconstrained.

_What just happened? Did you do that?_

**No. I don’t think it was what we did back there, either. The wards didn’t break, they were… released?**

As they pondered that question, Dean’s phone started ringing. He expected it to be Charlie, scheduling the rendezvous they didn’t need anymore to break Cas’s wards, but instead he saw Bobby’s name. Dean’s stomach twisted with guilt. Bobby might’ve been okay with helping Dean get out, but the rest of it? He’d done what he had to, and he’d do it again in a heartbeat, but he didn’t know if he could face Bobby’s disappointment again. Still, he answered.

“Hey, Bobby.”

Bobby was gruff, but not angry. “Dean, be careful. Samuel ain’t with the rest of ’em. Gordon, too. They might be—”

“I know,” Dean interrupted. “We already ran into him, him and Gordon, and we took care of it. He’s okay, though he’ll be mad as hell when he wakes up. We’re planning to be long gone by then.”

After a long pause, Bobby confirmed, “You’re with the… I mean, you said we. You got there, then?”

“Yeah, Bobby.” He’d known. He really had known what Dean was going to do, and he’d still helped him. They had another ally, if a more reluctant one. “I’m here, and I’m with Cas. Castiel. That’s his name.”

“Good.” It didn’t exactly sound like Bobby thought it was good, but he was trying, and that was as amazing as it was surprising. “It work?”

“It—what?”

“The wards, idjit. Your, uh, guy there. Are my wards gone?”

He could hardly believe Bobby’s change of heart, but that didn’t stop him being grateful. “Yes! Yeah, Bobby, they’re gone and he’s back to—” Not back to normal, exactly. Not with the bond and his wings that still weren’t healing. But, “He’s good. Thank you. But… Why? What changed your mind?”

He harrumphed uncomfortably. “Well I wasn’t gonna let goddamn Gordon kill you, kid. I figured if you were going where I thought you were, the—Cas would be more likely to be on your side than he was. I dropped ’em as soon as I realized, but I guess it was too late anyway.”

“Not too late. It means a lot for him to be free, you have—you got no idea. Thank you.” Dean felt himself tearing up a bit; he was sure Bobby could hear it in his voice, and he didn’t care. “I, uh. I love you too, Bobby.”

“Oh, shuddup.”

“I mean it. Thank you. Me and Cas, we’re gonna bring Sam back. He’s coming with me, and Cas is too, so you just start getting everyone used to that idea.”

“Well,” Bobby snorted, “as long as you’re not asking for much.” Then, more somberly, “I’ll do what I can, but it ain’t gonna be easy. Honestly, even I’m still not a hundred percent on the whole thing, but I’m trusting you on this. You go save Sammy, I think it’ll go a long way with most of the guys.”

“Not Dad, though.”

“You worry about Sam,” Bobby said instead of denying it. “I’ll worry about your dad.”

Dean leaned against Cas’s shoulder, and Cas wrapped a charred wing around him. It was an odd sensation, the burned skin and melted feathers mixing with his awareness of Cas’s pain, but comforting nevertheless. He stroked it tentatively with a finger, pulling back even before Cas could protest at the sting of it.

_Sorry._

“Right. And if you get time, can you… His wings aren’t healing.”

**Dean, you don’t need to—**

_I’m gonna take care of you. You’re gonna take care of me. That’s what we’ve got now and you’ll damn well like it._

Chuckling softly, Cas pressed a kiss to the side of his head.

“So if you could look into that, I dunno, a spell or poultice or something, even just to stop the pain…”

“All right, all right, I get the idea. Get out of there before your grandpa puts some new holes in you.”

Aside from his time in the trunk, Cas had never been in a car before. **You’re sure it’s safe?**

Dean let the roll of his eyes as he opened the door answer that, along with his mildly exasperated push of what felt like half his life spent driving and nothing going wrong. The seatback posed a problem for his wings, particularly as sensitive as they were to touch; Dean had to lower it away so that Cas could sit upright without it pressing against the tender burns.

When Dean went around to his own side, Cas asked, **Do you know where we’re going?**

_Got some idea, yeah. Not sure where Ruby is, but I’ve got a line on a friend of hers. Whaddya say we go save the world?_

**Author's Note:**

> Looking for a masterpost to reblog? How sweet of you! [Here it is!](http://deancastropefest.tumblr.com/post/165258946587/title-like-lightning-under-your-skin-author-a)


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